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CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


Oe 


SHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


A Great Force in History __.. 


BY 
IAN C. HANNAH, F‘S.A. 


PROFESSOR OF CHURCH HISTORY 
OBERLIN COLLEGE 


jQew Work 
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
1925 


All rights reserved 


CopyriIcHT, 1925, 
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 





Set up and printed. 
Published April, 1925. 


Printed in the United States of America by 
J. J. LITTLE AND IVES COMPANY, NEW YORK 


DEDICATED 
TO MY COLLEAGUES 
THE FACULTY 
OF OBERLIN COLLEGE 
A MARK OF 
AFFECTION AND ESTEEM 





PREFACE 


It is my experience as a teacher of history that there is 
no subject on which the ordinary student, even though per- 
haps tolerably well read upon the Middle Ages, is more 
vague in his mind than upon the place of Christian monasti- 
cism in the story of the world. That is the theme with 
which I have tried to deal, and though many excellent things 
have been written about monks I am not aware of the exist- 
ence of any book which deals with their earnest labours for 
mankind from just this point of view. The subject is, of 
course, dealt with to some extent in very many works. 

The twin pillars of medieval civilization were the tradi- 
tion of Rome and Christian monasticism (rather than the 
Christian faith as such), and each had a great contribution 
to make. “The Holy Roman Empire,” by the late Lord 
Bryce, will ever remain a classic concerning the former. 
With the work of that most eminent scholar it would indeed 
be the very height of presumption that I should compare 
my own. 

Nevertheless, I have attempted to set forth the main out- 
lines of the second pillar of medisvalism—those tasks so 
well achieved by the monks whose original traditions might 
have appeared so exceedingly unpromising. 

I have sought to keep in mind the needs of all students, 
not merely those specializing in ecclesiastical history. This 
book has been my chief occupation for about eight years 
past, during the rather scanty leisure of a college professor. 
No one can be more conscious of its faults than myself. I 
have supplied a mere introduction. The theme is such as 
would justify a really great work. 

i 


8 PREFACE 


If, however, these few pages shall stir up some scholar to 
treat a vast historical field with the fulness of a Gibbon or 
a Hodgkin my work will not have been altogether in vain. 

I confess myself a great admirer of all that is best in the 
monasticism of the Christian Church. I trust that no word 
I have written will grate upon the feelings of any reader, 
whatever his convictions or his faith. 

| Ba 445 ¥. 
Oberlin College, 
Easter, 1924. 


‘ CONTENTS 


INTRODUCTION 
CHAPTER 
Tue Desert Monks or Eaypt . 


i 


II. THe Work or S. Bast anp His Successors 
III. Tue First Monks or THE WEST 
IV. §S. BeEnepict 

V. Monk ReEsBvuinpers or A Wor.LpD 
VI. Cerntic Monasticism . 

VII. Nuns, Hermits anp Pincrms 
VIII. Tue Great House or Ciuny 
IX. SS. Bernard anp THE CISTERCIANS 
X. Tue Rist or THE Friars 
XI. Tue Monk as Missionary 
XII. Tue Monk as STATESMAN 
XIII. THe Monk as Souprer 
XIV. Monastic Literature 
XV. Monastic Art 


XVI. THe DEcLINE oF THE GREAT MEDIEVAL ORDERS . 


XVII. Jesuits anp Later ORDERS . 


PAGE 


11 


19 

39 

56 

74 

86 
101 
110 
123 
138 
154 
173 
188 
198 
208 
223 
239 
247 


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INTRODUCTION 


That ascetics who had left the world in blank despair, 
voting it so vile as to be past all hope of mending, should in 
their lonely cloisters, amid desert or forest, have evolved an 
efficiency that was not known outside, was far indeed from 
being logical. But so it was. Monks were compelled to 
take the leading part in raising up again that culture of the 
West that ceased to be when from the nerveless hand of 
Rome the rod of empire fell. 

It was not logical, nor even likely, but so it came to pass 
that those who had abandoned their fellows to gain a fore 
taste of the world beyond, were called by an impulse that 
was irresistible to take a leading part in the affairs of the 
very world that they had scorned. Perhaps, indeed, they 
bore the greatest share of all in the rebuilding of European 
civilization after barbarian hordes from North and East had 
tramped it in the dust. At the very least, the magnificent 
culture of the Middle Ages would without monastic inspira- 
tion have been so much impoverished as to become a totally 
different, a far inferior thing. 

Here lies the gripping interest and the extraordinary 
inspiration in the study of monastic story. It is hardly too 
much to say that in these unhappy times our stricken world 
is waiting for some such compelling force as, in those days 
long past, devoted monks gave to Europe in despair when 
the glory that had once been Rome lay, ruined cities, blood- 
soaked plains, at the feet of miscreant barbarian hordes. 

Organized asceticism cannot be claimed as a distinctively 
Christian institution. Its origins must unquestionably be 
sought beyond the confines of Christianity and even of 

11 


12 INTRODUCTION 


Judaism, whose ideals were most unmonastic in every respect. 
Centuries before Christ came, monks were flourishing in 
countries much farther to the east than the parts of Asia 
that He knew. 

There would appear to be good grounds for claiming as 
the original home of the monk either India or some closely 
bordering land.*’ That part of Asia through all the ages has 
been most interested in problems of religion, to the exclu- 
sion of political development. All the faiths that were cra- 
dled on Indian soil have very strongly, though in varying 
degrees, emphasized ascetic ideals, a thing not true of lands 
to the east or the west. Asceticism seems to be of the 
essence of all truly Hindu religious conceptions, in spite 
of the fact that the Brahman priesthood has ever formed a 
married caste. 

In the two other great centres of primeval Oriental 
thought—Kgypt, with Mesopotamia and the Far East— 
nothing quite analogous was known. For in Egypt, Assyria, 
and Babylon, intensely religious though they were, no severe 
mortifications, nor even celibacy, appear to have been re- 
quired from the powerful priesthoods, while in China and 
Japan there was virtually no hierarchy at all till the yellow- 
robed Buddhists from India arrived. 

These were the first to make monasticism a real force in 
the history of the world, and the monks and nuns were in- 
stituted by Buddha himself. The ideal was already vener- 
able in his time; it had been enriched and developed by 
the legacy of perhaps twenty centuries of Indian thought. 
China’s ancient culture was modified by the influence of 
Buddhist monasticism, which in Japan virtually founded 
civilization, much as the Christian monks introduced orderly 
life over wide areas of northern Europe. Beyond the moun- 
tains that wall India still exists by far the largest of all 


1See Flinders Petrie, Personal Religion in Egypt before Christianity, 
p. 57 


INTRODUCTION 13 


monastic political states (p. 189) where the wide highlands 
of Tibet are governed by Lama monks—the most powerful 
hierarchy that Buddhism ever knew. In some respects there 
is a very remarkable similarity between the secular careers 
of Buddhist monks in Eastern Asia and of Christian ones in 
Western Europe. 

Christ lived among men and took part in the social func- 
tions of His time. Women were among His friends. He 
instituted no monastic order. He impressed on His disciples 
nothing of the kind. Three centuries had passed away before 
any of His adherents were anchorites or monks. And yet, 
at least followed in one direction, monasticism may fitly be 
called the climax and the crown of His ideals. 

Alone among all the great religious teachers of the world, 
He never was married. He was heralded by the Baptist her- 
mit. He spent much of His time in lonely contemplation 
among the deserts. He declared that the man that did not 
hate his father and his mother could not be His disciple; He 
told a rich young man who wished to be perfect that he might 
go, sell everything he had and give to the poor. His teach- 
ings are full of exhortations that are admirably appropriate 
to monks and yet in some cases very hard sayings to those 
who live in the world. 

It was hearing some of these read as the Gospel for the 
day that caused S. Antony to embrace his severely ascetic 
life? And yet it is not unlikely that He knew nothing dur- 
ing His earthly sojournings of any professed ascetics. The 
Jewish Essene monks at Engaddi were not by any means 
prominent in Palestine, at least so far as we know. As a 
general rule Jewish religious enthusiasm, prominently rep- 
resented in Pharisaism, took very different forms. 

To the Oriental view that matter is an evil thing in itself 
and that our vile bodies need to be subdued by asceticism, 


* Life, by S. Athanasius; 2. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd 
series, vol. iv, p. 196. 


14 INTRODUCTION 


the first origins of monasticism must unquestionably be 
referred. Such ideas, in a most exaggerated form indeed, 
were introduced into Christianity by Gnosticism, but it was 
not from such that came the inspiration of Christian monasti- 
cism. So great a movement was not stained by heresy at its 
birth, though in its early days it did unquestionably repre- 
sent an acute reaction against the sacramental system of the 
Church. 

S. Paul, the hermit, and S. Antony, serving God in the 
farthest recesses of the wilderness, found little need for the 
ministrations of the priests, and must for years together 
have gone without receiving the Holy Communion. On one 
occasion it required a special miracle to let S. Benedict know 
when it was Easter Day.® 

Long before Christianity had adopted monasticism in any 
formal way, the Church had been to some extent permeated 
by its spirit. S. Paul himself declares that he that giveth 
his daughter in marriage doeth well, but he that abstaineth 
doeth better. The “Shepherd of Hermas” is full of the 
praises of virginity. Origen tells us that “certain among 
them, from a desire of exceeding chastity * * * wish to 
worship God with greater purity and abstain even from the 
permitted indulgences of lawful love.’ * Tertullian, though 
married himself, speaks in many places of the superior sanc- 
tity of virginity. 

Most of the Fathers, both East and West, may somewhere 
or other be quoted to justify Dr. Hatch’s generalization that, 
in the early Church, “To marry was indeed not a sin, but it 
was a confession of weakness: to marry a second time was 
almost to lapse from grace.” ® 

The earliest home of Christian monasticism was almost 
certainly Egypt, which by the very forbidding nature of its 

* Gregory, Dialogues, bk. II, ¢. 1. 

*Agaimst Celsus, bk. I, ch. xxvi. 


5 Organisation of the Early Christian Churches, Bampton Lectures, 
1880, p. 43. 


INTRODUCTION 15 


scenery appears at all times to have turned the minds of its 
inhabitants to thought of the other world. There were other 
monks than the Christian ones, the Therapeute of Philo in 
earlier, and the Moslem dervishes in later times. Unlike 
some Oriental religions, and notably Buddhism, Christianity 
cannot at any time be said to have depended for existence 
upon monastic organization. 

In the Western Church to this day monastic and secular 
clergy exist side by side, either being qualified to hold any 
administrative office. In the East, while the higher offices 
are unfortunately reserved for monks, the main work of the 
parishes is performed by a married clergy. but for some- 
thing like a thousand years, from the sixth century to the 
sixteenth, monasticism was in varying degrees and in dif- 
ferent forms the dominating influence in Western Europe 
in the affairs both of Church and State. 

In studying its long and wonderful career, four great. 
periods seem clearly to stand out. They are very unequal 
in length, but each is characterized by a new and different 
scope for the energy of the religious.® 

The first extends from the Oriental beginnings till the 
days when in the sixth century the great 8. Benedict gave 
monasticism, unconsciously enough, something of the organ- 
izing power of the West: this period is dominated by SS. 
Antony, Pachomius, and Basil the Great (Chh. i, ii). 

The second embraces the long centuries during which the 
Benedictine monk was laying firmly down the foundations 
of the splendid culture of the Middle Ages and the days 
when rather numerous reform movements were giving birth 
to the daughter orders: this period is dominated in turn by 
the early Benedictines, the Cluniacs, and the Cistercians 
(Chh. iii-ix). 

‘This word is convenient as denoting all “regular” clergy; that is, 


those who live by rule beyond the ordinary ordination vows, whether 
monks, friars, canons, or clerks. 


16 INTRODUCTION 


The third is the era of the friars when S. Francis of 
Assisi and 8. Dominic (by no means for the first time) were 
seeking to find a definite work for ascetics to accomplish. 
This movement began in the early part of the thirteenth cen- 
tury, the climax of medizval culture (Ch. x). | 

During the fourth period the Church of Rome was mak- 
ing the most energetic efforts by means of her new orders— 
especially the Jesuits—to repair the losses that the Reforma- 
tion caused (Ch. xvii). 


BIBLIOGRAPHY: 


The main facts about each phase of monasticism are to be 
found in numerous articles of the Hncyclopedia Britannica, and 
in larger detail in the Catholic Encyclopedia. 

General works on the subject are Herbert Workman’s Evolution 
of the Monastic Ideal, and O. Hardman’s The Ideals of Asceticism. 
Both these are excellent; the former is especially to be com- 
mended for its copious references to the sources; the latter is very 
comprehensive and carries the story far beyond the limits of 
Christianity. A very small book is Prof. Wishart’s (Chicago) 
Monks and Monasteries. 


CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


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CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


CHAPTER I 
THE DESERT MONKS OF EGYPT 


The first of Christian monks was named S. Paul. His 
life has been written, not very critically, by S. Jerome. 
From the Decian persecution he fled to the remotest recesses 
of the desert and a man learned in all the wisdom of Egypt 
and of Greece, wealthy and cultured, was content for long 
years to dwell alone in a cave where a secret mint had existed 
in the days of Cleopatra and Antony. 

The blessed Paul had lived the life of heaven on earth 
for a hundred and thirteen years when he was visited by 
S. Antony, another monk who was destined to a larger share 
of fame. S. Antony was directed to the spot by friendly 
beasts of rather fearsome shape, the first a hippo-centaur, 
half man, half horse. “This monster, after gnashing out 
some kind of outlandish utterance, in words broken rather 
than spoken through his bristling lips, at length finds a 
friendly mode of communication, and extending his right 
hand points out the way desired. Then with swift flight he 
crosses the spreading plain and vanishes from the sight of 
his wondering companion.” ? 

18. Jerome, Life of Paulus the first hermit, Nicene and Post-Nicene 
Fathers, 2nd ser., vol. vi, p. 300. In the Lausiac History of Palladius, 
bk. IT, ch. ii (vol. i, p. 197, seq. Paradise of the Holy Fathers, translated 
from the Syriac by Wallis Budge.) this beast gives no help and in faet 


turns out to be the devil. The Syriac version gives Jerome’s story in a 
slightly different form. 


19 


20 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


S. Antony was_amazed, for in all his ninety years he had 
seen nothing of the sort and as he passed along he pondered 
what he had witnessed. Another still more wonderful beast 
turned out to be a mortal man misled by the false faith of 
the Gentiles. 

The third was a she-wolf who pointed out the very cave. 
S. Antony entered “with halting step and bated breath, care- 
fully feeling his way. * * * At length through the fearful 
midnight darkness a light appeared in the distance. In his 
eager haste he struck his foot against a stone and roused the 
echoes, whereupon the blessed Paul closed the open door and 
made it fast with a bar.’ §. Antony, however, persisted. 
If S. Paul would receive wild beasts why not a man ? 

At length he was admitted, and the two old monks ex- 
changed the kiss of peace. S. Paul asked for the latest news: 
“How fares the human race? Are new homes springing up 
in the ancient cities? What government directs the world ? 
Are there still some remaining for the demons to carry away 
by their delusions?’ At supper time a raven brought them 
food, twice the usual ration it was wont to bear to S. Paul 
alone. For sixty years he had thus been fed. 

S. Antony was asked to return to the world to fetch the 
cloak of S. Athanasius in which to wrap the body of 8. Paul 
who rightly thought that he was nearing death. So he sped 
away to his little dwelling and, refusing to answer the eager 
questions of his disciples, returned to the cave with the 
cloak. 

But on the way he saw “Paul in robes of snowy-white 
ascending on high among the bands of angels and the choirs 
of prophets and apostles.” The rest of the way to the cavern 
he traversed at such speed that he flew along like a bird, 
and not without reason, for on entering the cave he saw the 
lifeless body in a kneeling attitude with head erect and hands 
uplifted. He wrapped the body in the cloak and carried it 
out, but had no spade to dig a grave. 


THE DESERT MONKS OF EGYPT 21 


Soon there came, with manes flying, from the recesses of 
the desert, two lions. “At first he was horrified at the sight, 
but again turning his thoughts to God, he waited without 
alarm, as though they were doves that he saw. They came 
straight to the corpse of the blessed old man and there 
stopped, fawned upon it and lay down at his feet, roaring 
as if to make it known that they were mourning in the only 
way possible to them. Then they began to paw the ground 
close by, and vie with one another in excavating the sand, 
until they dug out a place just large enough to hold a man.” 
Not until they had received his blessing with an “outburst of 
praise to Christ that even dumb animals felt His divinity,” 
did the lions leave S. Antony to his own thoughts. 

S. Jerome ends his narrative with the truly monastic re 
flexion: “I may be permitted to ask those who do not know 
the extent of their possessions, who adorn their homes with 
marble, who string house to house and field to field, what did 
this old man in his nakedness ever lack? Your drinking 
vessels are of precious stones: he satisfied his thirst with the 
hollow of his hand. Your tunics are of wrought gold: he 
had not the raiment of the meanest of your slaves. But, on 
the other hand, poor though he was, Paradise is open to him: 
you with all your gold will be received into Gehenna.” 

S. Paul the hermit has never bulked very large in Chris- 
tian tradition, but churches in his name are not unknown; 
there is one at Norwich, England. A few miles below Mon- 
treal is the village of S. Paul |’Hermite. 

Very much more famous is S. Antony, already named, a 
man of Coptic or Egyptian birth, generally reputed the 
father of Christian monasticism. His celebrated Life by 
S. Athanasius has given him an enduring name.? He is 

2The work is printed in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd ser., vol. 
iv, pp. 188-221. The evidence for its authenticity is well given in the 
introduction. The external evidence for 8S. Athanasius’ authorship seems 


to me far too strong to be set aside merely because parts of the work 
are rather unlike the great Bishop’s customary style. 


22 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


nowhere described as a pioneer. The Life itself mentions a 
convent for virgins (sec. 3) to which he sent his sister, and 
in the same connexion we are told: “For there were not yet 
many monasteries in Egypt and no monk at all knew of the 
distant desert.” * 

Monasticism, in all real essentials the same throughout the 
ages, appears indeed to have been well established by the 
time of 8. Antony, or even a little before. Not only are 
monks in considerable numbers assumed to be in existence 
as a matter of course, but there is no hint of their origin 
having been recent. Socrates expressly says that the aged 
bishop and confessor Paphnutius, who at Nicwa defended 
the married clergy, had been brought up in a monastery,‘ 
and had himself had no experience of wedded life. 

It can hardly be said that this Life gives promise of 
the glorious future of monasticism as one of the great con- 
structive forces of the world. When 8. Antony was “grown 
and arrived at boyhood and was advancing in years he could 
not endure to learn letters” and in later life, though his man- 
ners were not rough, but graceful and polite, and his speech 
was seasoned with the divine salt, he declared that whoever 
has a sound mind has no need of letters. 

On another occasion, as reported by Socrates,° he retorted 
when asked how he could get on deprived of the comfort of 
books: “My book, O philosopher, is the nature of things that 
are made, and it is present whenever I wish to read the 
words of God.” 

Nor are we left in any real doubt by the general tenor of 


*In Cassian’s Conferences, xviii, ch. x, Abbot Piamun says. that “mon- 
astery may mean the dwelling of a single monk.” That is probably 
the meaning here. 

“The word used is doxnrnp and the late Prof. Gwatkin of Cam- 
bridge used vigorously to deny that any convent existed at so early a 
date, but whatever sort of religious house is indicated it must clearly 
have been very much the same thing. See Hefele, History of the Chris- 
tian Councils to 825 A.D., Tr. by W. R. Clark, p. 435 seq. 

® Eoclesiastical History, bk. IV, ch. xxiii. 


THE DESERT MONKS OF EGYPT 23 


the Life that the sole object of S. Antony in leaving the 
busy haunts of men and going out to face the solitudes of 
the deserts was to save his own soul. Shutting himself up 
at first in a tomb and later in a fortress so long deserted that 
it was full of creeping beasts, he did everything to discour- 
age visitors. 

When they still found their way to his retreats he made 
for a yet remoter refuge on a hill of the inner desert, being 
conveyed thither by certain Saracens, who were presumably 
on trading journeys to the south, perhaps to the mysterious 
ruined settlements now known as Zimbabwe in Rhodesia, 
which are generally believed to have been built by men of 
that race. When on one occasion a military officer, who had 
induced him to come and make a brief address, desired that 
he would stay and continue his ministrations among men, he 
made the reply destined to be so famous in monastic annals: 
“Fishes, if they remain long on dry land, die. And so monks 
lose their strength if they loiter among you and spend their 
time with you. Wherefore as fish must hurry to the sea, so 
must we hasten to the mountain.” ® 
A great part of the Life is taken up with descriptions 
of how S. Antony by prayer and fasting overcame the in- 
numerable devils who kept coming to tempt him in many 
disguises, now seeking to terrify him by their frightful forms 
and again to tempt his virtue by assuming the shape of 
lovely girls. These imps are very familiar to readers of 
all monastic history, Buddhist as well as Christian. 

S. Antony’s primary object was to save his own soul, 
wrestling as an athlete by severe mortification to buffet his 
body and bring it into subjection: still, it would not be just 
to assert that he did nothing to benefit the world. To the 
numerous other monks he gave the most earnest exhortations ; 
in the churches of Alexandria he sometimes spoke against 


* Itfe, sec. 85. It will be remembered that Chaucer’s monk repudiated 
this very remark. 


24 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


the blasphemous errors of the Arians,’ he helped those who 
persisted in getting access to him, both by curing their sick- 
nesses and by exhorting them to a righteous life. 

As S. Athanasius nobly says: “Who in grief met Antony 
and did not return rejoicing? Who came mourning for his 
dead and did not forthwith put off his sorrow? Who came 
in anger and was not converted to friendship? What poor 
and low-spirited man met him, who hearing and looking 
upon him, did not despise wealth and console himself in his 
poverty? What monk, having been neglectful, came to him 
and became not all the stronger ?”’ 

S. Antony established no order and appears to have left 
no organization. This was done by his younger contem- 
porary, S. Pachomius, of whose work a rather full descrip- 
tion is given by Sozomen. Of all the early Church his- 
torians this writer is the most sympathetic with monasti- 
cism. He was himself a lawyer at Constantinople. “It is 
said,” he writes, “that Pachomius at first practised philoso- 
phy alone in a cave, but that a holy angel appeared to him, 
and commanded him to call together some young monks, and 
live with them, for he had succeeded well in pursuing phi- 
losophy by himself, and to train them by the laws which 
were about to be delivered to him.” 

The monastic life was termed philosophy because it was 
regarded not only as the climax of Christianity, but also as 
the highest and noblest expression of the ancient culture of 
the Greeks. ‘A tablet was then given to him which is still 
carefully preserved. Upon it were inscribed rules by which 
he was to permit every one to eat, drink, work and fast 
according to his capacity. Those who ate heartily were to 
have arduous labour; the ascetic more easy tasks. 

‘“‘Pachomius was to have many cells erected, each for three 


" Life, sec. 87. 
* But the great convent of S. Catharine on Mt. Sinai professes to fol- 
low his rule. 


THE DESERT MONKS OF EGYPT 25 


monks who were to eat in a common refectory in silence. 
They must have veils so arranged that they could not see 
each other, but only the table and the food. Only genuine 
travellers were to be received as guests. 

“Those who wished to join the community must undergo - 
a probation of three years with laborious tasks. They were 
to clothe themselves in skins, and to wear woollen tiaras 
adorned with purple nails, and linen tunics, and girdles. 
They were to sleep in their tunics and garments of skin, 
reclining on long chairs. * * * On the first and last days of 
each week they were to receive Communion in the Holy 
Mysteries, and were then to unloose their girdles and throw 
off their robes of skin. 

“They were to pray twelve times every day and as often 
during the evening, and were to offer the same number of 
prayers during the night. At the ninth hour they were to 
pray thrice, and when about to partake of food; they were 
to sing a psalm before each prayer.” ® Different classes were 
to be distinguished by letters of the Greek alphabet. 

There was a central house at Tabenna, in the Thebaid, 
where 8. Pachomius dwelt himself. There were other con- 
vents which looked up to the community on that island as 
their mother. The Superior of the central house nominated 
the heads of the daughter houses, and at Easter and in 
August a general chapter of the whole was held. There was 
thus a Pachomian order in the true sense of the word, the 
only one that ever existed in the East and far more closely 
bound together than any that came into being in the West 
till something like a thousand years later (p. 125). 

The order also included very numerous nuns, who dwelt 
on the mainland near the island of Tabenna, with a com- 
munity of married women who seem to have had quarters on 
the far side of the Nile. Of one of the virgins, Palladius *° 


; Sozomen, Eccl. Hist., bk. ITI, ch. xiv. 
» Lausiac History, bk. 1, ch. xxxiii. This same chapter gives an ac- 
count of the rule quite similar to that of Sozomen. 


26 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


tells a story which is of great human interest from its close 
resemblance to the tale of “Cinderella,” which has been 
traced to an ancient Egyptian original. She was not per- 
mitted to eat with the rest but was assigned the most menial 
work, and some of the sisters further showed their contempt 
by throwing over her the rinsings of their vessels. 

The blessed Piterius, however, visited the convent by 
direction of an angel and he caused no small sensation by 
saying: ‘Ye yourselves are creatures of contempt, but this 
woman is your mother and mine, and I entreat God that 
He will give me a portion with her in the day of judgment.” 

The sequel was less satisfactory, for the blessed woman, 
unable to endure the honour and praise that all the sisters 
now lavished upon her, left the house, but “‘where she went 
and when she died no man knows.” 

There is evidence that the monks in early days were looked 
on with some suspicion by the bishops. Palladius*? tells us 
how the blessed Nathaniel (d.c. 376) refused to escort for 
the distance of one step certain prelates who were all holy 
men and had prayed with him in his cell. When their 
servants found fault with this apparent want of courtesy 
he replied: ‘I died once for all to my lords the bishops and 
to the whole world, and I have a secret matter concerning 
which it is God only Who knoweth my heart and why I did 
not go forth and escort them.” | 

At first S. Pachomius was not favoured by the official 
Church and his way of life was condemned by a council. But 
by showing great deference and respect to the bishops he 
contrived completely to overcome their suspicion. In 330, 
S. Athanasius as bishop officially visited Tabenna. 

The loyalty of the monks to the Bishop of Alexandria 
appears sometimes to have left much to be desired. When 
Theophilus sent out his festal letter of 399, condemning the 


#7b., bk. 1, ch. exii. 


THE DESERT MONKS OF EGYPT oT 


heresy of the Anthropomorphites, so strongly were the soli- 
taries inclined to disagree that in the desert of Scete, so 
famed for its religious houses, none would even permit the 
letter to be read except an abbot named Paphnutius, who 
had formerly been an anchorite and was so fond of being 
alone as to have earned the surname of the Buffalo. 

It does not, however, appear that exemption from epis- 
copal control was claimed. Two monks made themselves 
eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake, and to their great 
surprise found themselves excommunicated by the local 
bishop. So they went to make a complaint to “the head of 
our monasteries,” the Bishop of Jerusalem. He confirmed 
the sentence, and the Bishop of Antioch took a precisely 
similar view. 

Then they went to the great Patriarch and Bishop of 
Rome and said to him: “We have come unto thee because 
thou art the head of them all.” Then the Bishop of Rome 
also said to them: ‘‘I also excommunicate you and excommu- 
nicate ye shall be.” ?? 

As a rule, the monks were laymen, and this was clearly 
considered the ideal. Of all. people “a monk ought by all 
means to fly from women and bishops. For neither of them 
will allow him who has once been joined in close intercourse 
any longer to care for the quiet of his cell, or to continue 
with pure eyes in divine contemplation there his insight into 
holy things.” 1% 

Occasionally it did happen that a monk was compelled to 
take some administrative post in the Church. Cassian’s 
point of view, which was undoubtedly very widely shared, 
is expressed in his account of “that most blessed and excel- 
lent man, Bishop Archbius, who had been carried off from 
the assembly of anchorites and given as bishop to the town 


4“ TLausiac History, Sayings of the Holy Fathers, 524. Budge, vol. ii, 
p. 118. 

4% Cassian, Institutes, XI, xviii; Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd ser., vol. xi, 
p-. 279. 


28 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


of Panephysis, and who kept all his life long to his purpose 
of solitude with such strictness that he relaxed nothing of the 
character of his former humility, nor flattered himself on the 
honour that had been added to him, for he vowed that he 
had not been summoned to that office as fit for it, but com- 
plained that he had been expelled from the monastic system 
as unworthy of it.” ** 

Heretical monks were not unknown; Sozomen?® and 
Socrates 7® tell us of the strange hallucinations of Eusta- 
thius, Bishop of Sebaste in Armenia, who founded a society 
of ascetics +” and there were otber examples, but as a rule 
monasticism was rigidly orthodox, at any rate in matters 
of importance. This sometimes drew upon the ascetics the 
wrath of Arianizing prelates. 

The adherents of Lucius, the Bishop of Alexandria, who 
succeeded S. Athanasius and was far from walking in his 
steps, “assailed and disturbed and terribly harassed the 
monastic institutions in the desert; armed men rushed in 
the most ferocious manner upon those who were utterly 
defenceless, and who would not lift an arm to repel their 
violence; so that numbers of unresisting victims were in 
this manner slaughtered with a degree of wanton cruelty 
beyond description.” +8 

This most unfortunate tendency. to violence could be used 
by both sides, and several councils were disgraced by the 
turbulence of great hordes of monks whose bravery, as Mil- 
man says, often shamed the languid patriotism of the im- 
perial troops.*® 

*Cassian, Conferences, XI, ch. ii, P.N.F. 2nd ser., vol. xi, p. 416. 

% Feel. Hist., Ill, xiv. 

*%* Ecol, Hist., II, xliii. 

Their vile ‘parody of Christian monasticism, which included a pro- 
hibition of marriage, was condemned by the synod at Gangra, about the 
middle of the fourth century. All details will be found in Hefele, His- 
tory of the Councils of the Church, trans. H. N. Oxenham, vol. ‘ii, p- 
a Berton, Moot, Hise. IV. exit 

* Latin Christiamty, vol. i, p. 344. 


THE DESERT MONKS OF EGYPT 29 


S. Pachomius prescribed only a moderate asceticism, but 
left his monks free to go beyond it if they would. Very 
soon the Egyptian solitaries were vying with one another in 
making records in asceticism, and that with enthusiasm at 
least equal to anything to be expected from the modern 
athlete. 

Sozomen relates 7° how Dorotheus, a native of Thebes, 
“spent the day in collecting stones upon the sea-shore, which 
he used in erecting cells to be given to those who were unable 
to build them. During the night he employed himself in 
weaving baskets of palm leaves and these he sold to obtain 
the means of subsistence. He ate six ounces of bread with 
a few vegetables daily and drank nothing but water. 

“Having accustomed himself to this extreme abstinence 
from his youth, he continued to observe it in old age. He 
was never seen to recline on a mat or a bed, nor even to 
place his limbs in an easy attitude, or willingly to surrender 
himself to sleep. * * * He was once asked by a person 
who came to him while he was exhausting himself, why he 
destroyed the body. ‘Because it is destroying me,’ was the 
reply.” And when Palladius urged him to throw himself 
upon a mat of palm leaves and rest a little, he replied in a 
grieved manner: “If thou art able to persuade the angels to 
sleep thou wilt be able to persuade me.” 

Few of these monkish athletes could hear of any one else’s 
record in asceticism without promptly desiring to beat it. 
So very abstemious was Macarius of Alexandria, sur- 
named the Glorious, that not even the hairs of his beard 
would grow.*! Stories of these ascetic records fill up a very 
great part of all the histories of the Egyptian solitaries, but 
they are not very remarkable for variety. 

Monks, particularly in the East, have at all times in their 


Eccles. Hist., VI, xxix; Palladius, Lausiae History, I, ii, gives a 
very similar account. 
= Lausiac Hist., 11, xviii. 


30 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


lonely wilds felt a sympathetic fellowship with the beasts, 
who are almost always represented as their friends. This 
beautiful trait seems to betray far more the influence of 
India (p. 12) than that of early Christianity. 

Even S. Paul could ask: “Doth God take care for oxen ?”’ 2” 
In his ‘Life of Malchus, the Captive Monk,” S. Jerome re- 
lates how a lioness facilitated his escape.?* He had been 
led to relieve the monotony of his captivity by watching the 
useful labours of a colony of ants “whose toil is for the com- 
munity and since nothing belongs to any one, all things 
belong to all.” The description given of the ants shows 
close observation of their ways. 

Sulpicius Severus ** gives a detailed account of how a 
certain recluse living in a little hut in the valley of the 
Nile used to share his supper with a wolf. One day the wolf 
came and found no monk, but as it knew the way to the 
larder, it saw no reason why there should be no supper 
either. So it helped itself to a loaf, but afterwards 
when the monk returned it displayed a most dog-like 
contrition and the former pleasant relations were re- 
stored. 

The incident leads to the delightful reflexion: “Behold, I 
beg of you, the power of Christ to Whom all is wise that is 
irrational, and all is mild that is by nature savage. <A wolf 
discharges duty; a wolf acknowledges the crime of theft; a 
wolf is confounded with a sense of shame; when called for 
it presents itself; it offers its head to be stroked; and it has 
a perception of the pardon granted to it, just as if it had a 
feeling of shame on account of its misconduct. This is Thy 
power, O Christ; Thine, O Christ, are Thy marvellous 
works.” 

Macarius of Alexandria, already mentioned, was dili- 


1 Cor.) 1x; 9. 
* Sec. 9, Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd ser., vol. vi, pp. 315-318. 
*.Dialogues, I, xiv. 


THE DESERT MONKS OF EGYPT 31 


gently sought out by a hyena who brought him to her den 
and besought him to cure her blind whelp. On this being 
successfully accomplished, she brought a sheep-skin as fee.*° 
These stories are quite worthy of S. Francis of Assisi and 
the delightful manner in which he saw brothers and sisters 
in creatures of every kind (p. 155). 

One of the strangest of these animal tales is that of a 
holy man who, having fallen a victim to the wiles of a girl 
and fearing to be delivered to everlasting torment, roamed 
out in penitence to the farthest recesses of the wilds. A cer- 
tain brother, minded to go and see if any man were living 
in the inner desert, after finding a monk sitting in a cave 
who crumbled into dust and became nothing at all on being 
touched, for he was dead, “saw a number of beasts which 
are called buffaloes and the servant of God was in their 
midst, naked; and his hair had been made into a covering 
for his shame.” At first he was vexed at seeing a fellow- 
mortal, whom he mistook for a devil in disguise, but even- 
tually he told him his story.”® 

Animal tales are a very usual feature of later monasticism 
in the West as well as the East. S. Guthlac of Croyland 37 
(p. 228) said: “Who hath led his life after God’s will the 
wild beasts and the birds become friendly with him. To 
the man who will live away from the world the angels draw 
nigh.” In 1672 a Jesuit named Toussaint Bridoul pub- 
lished at Lille “The School of the Eucharist,” in which he 
shows how animals of every kind, beasts, insects, birds and 
fish display their reverence for Christ.*8 

It was the excellent John Cassian (c. 360-c. 433), who 
first seriously brought to the attention of the West what was 


5 Lausiac History, II, xviii. The same story occurs in (§ 376) Ques- 
tions and Answers on the Ascetic Rule, Budge, II, p. 228, but the animal 
is a panther. 

* Lausiac History, II, xvii. Budge, I, p. 236-268. 

* Gray Birch, Memorials of St. Guthlac, p. 37 (1881). 

* The chapter headings are given by G. G. Coulton, Five Centuries of 
Religion, vol. i, pp. 492-494. 


32 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


best in the monasticism of the East. Gennadius ?® tells us 
that he was “‘natione Scytha,” but if he was really of bar- 
barian birth (which is very doubtful), he affords a most 
inspiring example of the manner in which the dwindling 
empire was sharing its civilization with the outer world. 
While still very young, Cassian entered a monastery at 
Bethlehem in company with his friend Germanus. He 
must frequently have worshipped in the great Church of the 
Nativity, the oldest Christian building of any size that still 
exists, then about fifty years old (p. 226). 

Beneath its choir is the cave where Christ was born, and 
a little to the north is the rock-cut grotto where at least 
traditionally S. Jerome *° lived and wrote, but that great 
doctor did not settle in Bethlehem (close of 386), till Cas- 
sian had with his friend passed on into Egypt. While trav- 
elling in the valley of the Nile, Cassian interviewed many 
famous monks and what they had to say he records in his 
“Oonferences.” 

As these were written in Provence he must have kept a 
very full diary while in Egypt, or else the long and very 
detailed discourses attributed to numerous abbots and others 
are really his own composition, based, no doubt, on his mem- 
ory of many conversations of years before. Internal evidence 
points very strongly indeed to the former view. 

The “Conferences” have a genuine ring and there is 
strong individuality in the discourses of many of the monks. 
Cassian’s whole point of view is honest and sincere and his 
works inspire a most genuine respect for his character. 

The monasticism of that day is clearly most completely 
unconscious of its great and splendid future, nor is there 
any hint that the monks hoped to do anything more than 

”® Catalogus, OC. Ixii. It is possible that this does not mean Scythian; 
it may have some reference to Scete in Egypt. 

* This great Father is mentioned by Cassian with profound respect in 


the preface to the Institutes and in his Treatise against Nestorius, bk. 
VII, ch. xxvi. 


THE DESERT MONKS OF EGYPT 33 


to save their own souls by a life peculiarly acceptable to 
God. Unbounded glory in the other world was believed to 
be the certain lot of those who faithfully served God in those 
lonely wilds.*? 

The keynote of the whole seems to be struck by an abbot 
named John, who explained that in the utmost expanse of 
the wilderness the monks were caught up into celestial ecsta- 
sies and saw something of that life which can only be com- 
pared to the bliss of the angels.** Visitors were a most 
unwelcome distraction. 

An exceedingly high standard of asceticism was not in- 
frequently attained. Abbot Patermucius had entered a con- 
vent accompanied by his little boy, a child of eight. He 
was required to give the most convincing proofs that affec- 
tion for his own flesh and blood meant far less to him than 
obedience and Christian mortification. Uncomplainingly he 
saw the poor boy neglected, ill-treated, clothed in rags, and 
starved. 

At last he stood prepared to throw the child into the river 
to drown, but this was prevented by the other monks. God 
was so well pleased by this complete self-abnegation that 
“He forthwith revealed to the superior that by this obedi- 
ence the father had copied the deed of Abraham, and when 
shortly afterwards the same abbot of the monastery departed 
out of this life to Christ he preferred him to all the brethren 
and left him as his successor.” ** Of the child we hear no 
more. 

In much the same spirit, a brother, after an absence of 
fifteen years from his home in Pontus, received a huge 
packet of letters from his father, mother, and many 
friends.** Turning over the matter in his mind for some 


% Institutes, bk. IV, ch. xxxiii. 

* Conferences, XIX, v. 

*® Institutes, IV, ch. xxvii-xxviii. 

4 Institutes, V. ch. xxxil. (See p. 255 for a very similar story of Ig- 
natius Loyola, which illustrates the unvarying type of monastic ideals 
through all the centuries.) 


34 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


time he reflected, “What thoughts will the reading of these 
suggest to me, which will incite to senseless joy or useless 
sorrow! For how many days will they draw off the atten- 
tion of my heart from the contemplation I have set before 
me by the recollection of those who wrote them! How long 
will it take for the disturbance of mind thus created to be 
calmed!” So without even untying the package he tossed 
it into a fire. 

The holy Abbot Theonas had left his wife, despite her 
earnest entreaties not to break up the home. In the desert 
in a very short time he was so famous for the splendour of 
his sanctity and humility that he was by the judgment of 
all chosen abbot.*® Cassian, however, shows his good sense 
by expressing very serious doubts as to whether marriage 
be not too sacred a thing to be lightly discarded even for 
the sake of a yet higher ideal. 

It is delightful to get so liberal an attitude toward other 
faiths as is illustrated by the following story. The Abbot 
Macarius, on one occasion raised to life the body of an 
ancient Egyptian, and having heard that he lived under 
kings of very early date and had never so much as heard 
the name of Christ, he bade him “Sleep in peace with the 
others in your own order to be aroused again by Christ in 
the end.” 7° 

This is in rather striking contrast with the more usual 
attitude of the Christian Fathers and most of the monks, 
who identified the gods of old with the devils from whom 
they conceived themselves to be suffering so much. An old 
monk from Thebais, whose father had been a pagan priest, 
gives a most delightful story of Satan reviewing his forces 
in the temple where he used to minister. 

A devil who in thirty days “stirred up many wars and 
revolts and caused the shedding of blood,” was beaten for 
not doing far more. Other imps with similar records, such 

* Conferences, XXI, ix. OF LU: eV, All, 


THE DESERT MONKS OF EGYPT 35 


as stirring up storms and sinking ships, or making war at a 
marriage feast, fared exactly the same. 

But at length came a devil who was able to report, “I 
have been in the desert for forty years, striving with a 
monk and tonight I have hurled him into fornication.” 
Satan at once rose up and embraced that imp, delightedly 
setting him upon the throne beside him with the words, 
“And so thou hast been able to do so great a work in so 
short a time! For there is nothing which I prize so highly 
as the fall of a monk.” 7 

The monks were very sure that as the vanguard of the 
armies of the Lord they had to bear the brunt of infernal 
attacks upon mankind. Abbot Serenus explained that the 
atmosphere between heaven and earth is ever filled with a 
thick crowd of spirits always on the lookout to do harm and 
hindered neither by bodily fatigue, occupation in business, 
nor care about daily food, but a merciful providence in 
order that man might have some peace of mind has rendered 
them invisible to mortal eyes.?° 

It is, however, comforting to know that the same abbot 
thoroughly discerned both by his own experience and by 
the testimony of the elders that the devils had not in his 
day the same power as in the early days of the anchorites. 
For in those times when monks first dared to live in the 
haunts of the devils, so great was their violence that the 
ascetics could not all go to bed at night. While some snatched 
a little sleep others kept watch, praying and singing psalms. 
But later on, the imps showed some disposition to accept the 
inevitable, though persecuting the monks as far as they 
could.®?, 

But while concentrating their efforts on the unfortunate 
monks the devils let no one alone. A pious woman who was 

* Lausiac History; Sayings of the Holy Fathers, bk. I, ch. xiv, sec. 
632. Budge, II, p. 146. 


*% Conf., VIII, xii. 
et BIE 2 ati 


36 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


devoutly saying her prayers to the Blessed Trinity in a 
church, suddenly found Satan by her side. He asked why 
she was satisfied to pray like a man and suggested that she 
say instead: “Glory be to thee, O Mary, mother of Christ.” *° 
The story is very strange considering that the Virgin was 
afterwards to become the most popular of monastic saints. 

We nowhere get the slightest hint that the monks ever 
doubted that they were the most perfect of mankind. In 
reply to the direct question, “Supposing a man in the world 
conducteth himself in an absolutely perfect manner and 
according to what is right, is not his labour equal to that 
of a beginner?” An old monk replied laconically, “No.” 44 
Yet he would only give a commonplace and very unsatisfying 
answer when the brethren said: “Why do the monks who 
have led a life of hard labour become in their old age silly 
and simple and act in a foolish way like children and drunken 
men?” 42 No effort whatever was made to question the fact. 

Although we read in vain for any conception that the 
monks had any duty to the world, the holy men did not by 
any means refuse to help if they were sought out in their 
desert fastnesses. The blessed Macarius, the Egyptian, re- 
stored to her proper form a wife who had been turned into 
the similitude of a mare by sorcery employed by a rascal 
lover, bidding her be more regular in receiving the Blessed 
Sacrament; and he did other acts of mercy. Yet to avoid 
the vast concourse that came to consult him, he constructed 
an underground tunnel leading from his ¢ell to a cave yet 
more remote.** 

Thais, the courtesan of Alexandria, was converted by the 
monks and persuaded to enter a sisterhood. 


“ This tale occurs twice, Lausiac History, bk. II, Questions and An- 
swers on the Ascetic Rule, secs. 575, 706. Budge, vol. ii, pp. 270, 335. 

“Tb., 611, Budge, IT, p. 286. 

“Tb., 639, Budge, II, p. 307. The line taken is that they become as in- 
nocent children. 

* Laus. Hist., bk. I, ch. xvii. Budge, I, pp. 115-116. 


THE DESERT MONKS OF EGYPT 37 


Perhaps the most human touch in all the long accounts of 
the monks that we have is Cassian’s stories of some who, 
having given up great riches, vast estates, and large sums 
of money in order to enter a monastery, are much perturbed 
over the loss of a pencil or a pin.*4 

This earliest period of Christian monasticism can hardly 
be called constructive. The ascetics were very individual- 
istic and had little notion of working together. Instead of 
doing any great thing for the world, their drawing away so 
many earnest men and women from parenthood must have 
had a most devastating effect on the empire at a time when 
the dwindling of its population was the chief single cause of 
its fall.*° Several of the Fathers try to defend virginity 
from this point of view, not as a rule very successfully. 

In themselves, perhaps, the very voluminous tales that 
we may read on the subject of Egyptian monasticism are 
not particularly absorbing or varied. But their intense 
human interest lies in the fact that in them we may trace 
the sources of one of the most splendid civilizations that 
the world has ever known. Latin monasticism was never 
ashamed of its origins. In all sorts of medieval writings 
one comes across appreciative references to the ancient 
Fathers of the desert. The triple foundations of modern 
civilization are the culture of Greece, the organizing power 
of Rome, and the monasticism of the Christian Church. 
The third was to show itself, paradoxical as it may appear, 
by far the most pregnant and lifeful. 


BIBLIOGRAPHY: 


The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, con- 
tains: vol. II, Socrates and Sozomen, Hcclesiastical Histories; vol. 


“Conferences, I, vi. In actual scholarship Egyptian monasticism 
reached its climax in Abbot Shenoute who was taken by 8. Cyril to the 
Council of Ephesus. 

“Very full proofs of this may be found in Seeley, Roman Imperialism. 
Milman (History of Christianity, III, p. 219) quotes on the subject from 

S. Ambrose a defence which is singularly unconvincing. 


38 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


III, Theodoret, Gennadius and Rufinus, historical writings, etc.; 
vol. IV, Athanasius, Life of Antony and other works; vol. XI, 
Sulpicius Severus, Vincent of Lerins, and John Cassian. 

Palladius, Lauwsiac History (so called from its dedication to the 
prefect Lausus) ed. Abbot Butler, 2 vols. Paradise of the Holy 
Fathers, translated from the Syriac version by Ernest A. Wallis 
Budge (1907), embraces mostly the same material. 

The atmosphere of the desert monks is very well represented 
in Kingsley’s Hypatia, and Anatole France’s Thais. This 
phase of Church history seems rather to have been neglected in 
the ordinary works. 


CHAPTER II 
THE WORK OF §S. BASIL AND HIS SUCCESSORS 


The great S. Basil (¢. 329-379) belonged to an aristocratic 
family which had for several generations been Christian 
and owned considerable estates among the mountains of 
Cappadocia. He is famous for his unswerving support of 
the Nicene cause when Arianism was exceedingly strong 
and for his large share in composing the liturgy of the 
Church, but even more for his organisation of monasti- 
cism. The uplands of Asia Minor had early become one 
of the chief strongholds of the Church in days when, in 
the western part of the empire, Christianity was practi- 
cally confined to city congregations, the country districts 
still being pagan. 

S. Basil’s father had embraced the profession of law. 
The boy was one of a family of ten. He had every ad- 
vantage that birth and money could secure. In 351, with 
his friend Gregory Nazianzen, he went to study at the uni- 
versity of Athens, which was then one of the principal cen- 
tres of learning in the empire. His studious and sensitive 
nature suffered greatly from the hazing with which, even 
then, students sought to relieve the arduous monotony of 
learning, for the atmosphere of great colleges has in some 
respects been one of the most permanent features of West- 
ern civilisation. Later on, he found the life exceedingly 
congenial. After graduating, to use a modern term which 

1 This is described in great detail in his Funeral Oration by Gregory 


N. (secs. 15, 16), in words that might describe the present-day stunts of 
American students, if a few local details were changed. 


39 


40 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


was not then in use, he travelled extensively in the lands 
beside the eastern Mediterranean, carefully avoiding the 
society of heretics. For the character of the Egyptian 
monks he acquired a most lively admiration; in their way 
of life, he saw possibilities of almost endless good. 

Thus exceedingly well equipped by birth, education, and 
travel, reinforced by great natural ability, he returned to 
his native Cappadocia, determined to advance the cause 
of the Christian Church. In a most lovely spot beside the 
Iris, perhaps, as Lowther Clarke suggests, on the ancestral 
estates, he organized his famous monastery, the Monte 
Cassino of the East. 

The ancient monks, it would seem, had made it a spe- 
cial point to seek out the most unattractive sites for their 
habitations that flat, treeless wastes of burning sand could 
provide. S. Basil had other conceptions. His own vivid 
description of the valley where he placed his convent does 
much to recall the situations of some of the loveliest abbeys 
of Yorkshire and the Scottish Lowlands. It is almost unique 
among monastic writings, which scarcely ever show any ap- 
preciation of natural scenery, and it also gives us a charm- 
ing insight into the beauty of his own character. 

“There is a lofty mountain covered with thick woods, 
watered towards the north with cool and transparent 
streams. A plain lies beneath, enriched by the waters 
which are ever draining off from it, and skirted by a spon- 
taneous profusion of trees almost thick enough to be a 
fence; so as even to surpass Calypso’s Island, which Homer 
seems to have considered the most beautiful spot on the 
earth. 

“Indeed it is like an island, enclosed as it is on all sides; 
for deep hollows cut off two sides of it; the river, which 
has lately fallen down a precipice, runs all along the front, 
and is impassable ag a wall; while the mountain extending 
itself behind, and meeting the hollows in a crescent, stops 


WORK OF S. BASIL AND HIS SUCCESSORS 41 


up the path at its roots. There is but one pass, and I am 
master of it. 

“Behind my abode there is another gorge, rising into a 
ledge up above, so as to command the extent of the plains 
and the stream which bounds it, which is not less beautiful, 
to my taste, than the Strymon as seen from Amphipolis. 
For while the latter flows leisurely, and swells into a lake 
almost, and is too still to be a river, the former is the most 
rapid stream I know, and somewhat turbid, too, from the 
rocks just above; from which, shooting down, and eddying 
in a deep pool, it forms a most pleasant scene for myself 
or any one else; and is an inexhaustible resource to the 
country people in the countless fish which its depths con- 
tain. What need to tell of the exhalations from the earth, 
or the breezes from the river? Another might admire the 
multitude of flowers and singing birds; but leisure I have 
none for such thoughts. 

“However, the chief praise of the place is, that being 
happily disposed for produce of every kind, it nurtures 
what to me is the sweetest produce of all, quietness; indeed, 
it is not only rid of the bustle of the city, but is even un- 
frequented by travellers, except a chance hunter. It abounds 
indeed in game, as well as other things, but not, I am glad 
to say, in bears or wolves, such as you have, but in deer, 
and wild goats, and hares, and the like. Does it not strike 
you what a foolish mistake I was near making when I was 
eager to change this spot for your Tiberina, the very pit of 
the whole earth?’ ? His sister, Macrina, founded a con- 
vent for women on the other side of the stream. 

For S. Basil the ascetic life is Christianity in its purest 
form. The monk is the truest Christian of all mankind. 
He and he alone can follow Christ’s precepts in a perfectly 
literal way. ‘The effect on the community was not very 
prominent in the minds of the men of that day. The world 

* Letter XIV to Gregory, P.N., 2nd ser., vol. viii, pp. 124-125. 


42 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


was obviously passing away; the second advent was per- 
haps very close at hand. ‘The supreme importance of say- 
ing individual souls eclipsed and completely overshadowed 
all other considerations. Few of us can see things with 
the eyes of the fourth century. 

Yet in this direction, as in others, S. Basil greatly im- 
proved upon the monasticism of Egypt. By placing some of 
his convents in cities, by establishing schools in connexion 
with them—which were not purely for the purpose of train- 
ing recruits—by carrying on much charitable work in con- 
junction, and by bringing the whole system into union with 
the organisation of the Church, he may be said, and that 
for the first time, to have justified the existence of monasti- 
cism from the standpoint of the world. 

But he never attempts to dodge the fact that the primary 
object is to benefit the souls of the monks, not to uplift 
society. At the same time, his strong feeling that the cceno- 
bitical * life is far superior to that of the hermit is based 
on the fact that for the solitary, many duties of Christian 
love are impossible, while he has no one to correct him for 
his faults and he is in danger of imagining he has reached 
perfection. 

The Basilian rule is contained in the ascetic writings, 
especially the “Regule fusius tractate’’ and the “Regul 
brevius tractate,’’ which are in form of question and 
answer.* They are most unsystematic, not to be compared 
with the admirably clear rule of S. Benedict (p. 77) nor 
even that of 8. Francis of Assisi (p. 158). 

No Basilian order ever existed, but these writings have 
been the main guides of Oriental monks to the present day. 


* That is to say community life as opposed to eremitical or entirely 
solitary existence. 

‘There is strong external evidence that these were written by S. Basil, 
though Sozomen mentions the report that they were sometimes attrib- 
uted to a heretic, Eustathius of Sebaste, Hccl. Hist., III, xiv. It seems 
certain that this was not the case. 


] WORK OF S. BASIL AND HIS SUCCESSORS 43 


S. Basil had probably visited Tabenna and he was indebted 
to S. Pachomius for many valuable ideas, but he found noth- 
ing worthy of imitation in the order that bound the dif- 
ferent houses closely together. In fact even in Egypt it 
must before long have died out. 

S. Basil’s precepts are based very closely on Scripture. 
The monk must ever be ready to follow the examples of 
Christ and the Apostles in every possible detail. Sometimes 
his interpretations seem rather forced, as when he quotes 
I Corinthians (vii. 15) as possibly justifying a profession 
of virginity without the consent of husband or wife. In 
S. Basil’s plan, monasteries were to be distributed, not at 
haphazard but as they are really required. Only one should 
exist in each parish (xwun) and if more have been insti- 
tuted it may be better to consolidate. The best size is such 
that one lamp and one fire will suffice; that is, that the com- 
munity would probably be from thirty to forty in num- 
ber. 

From the standpoint of secular history perhaps the most 
remarkable feature of S. Basil’s monasticism is his fear of 
anything resembling that democracy which in later years 
was to be evolved in the chapter-houses of the West and to 
become a noteworthy contribution to the progress of man- 
kind. The power of the Superior, in 8S. Basil’s system, is 
almost absolute; he must be obeyed even to death,, though 
not if his orders are clearly contrary to the word of 
God. 

The best educated of the monks are to devote themselves 
mainly to study, particularly of the sacred Scriptures; 
these form a privileged class, nominated by the Superior. 
They form a sort of council with the definite duty of admon- 
ishing the Superior himself if they consider he is making 
a serious mistake; to them an inferior monk who feels he 
has any grievance may appeal. 

In the absence of the Superior one of them is to take his 


Lt CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


place ‘lest a democratic state of things may arise.”*® The 
whole brotherhood may at times be called together, particu- 
larly in the matter of receiving or expelling members, but 
this house chapter is not entrusted with any considerable 
power. 

The Superior himself, instead of being elected by it, must 

be chosen by the heads of the neighbouring convents and 
after a time of probation accepted by the brethren. The 
organisation is decidedly aristocratic. It seems quite cer- 
tain that, in practice at any rate, the brethren whose chief 
duty was study would mostly be those from the wealthier 
homes; the poorer monks, including many former slaves, 
might have only the minimum of education needed to chant 
the choir offices and such training as was necessary for their 
manual work. The distinction may have corresponded, 
though not very closely, to that between monks and lay 
brothers, particularly in the Cistercian order, during later 
years (p. 151). 
* As in all systems of Christian monasticism, prayer is the 
central duty of the monk, but this is not to be an excuse for 
idleness or for shirking work.® Hight offices are prescribed 
for day and night with appropriate psalms, but if work made 
it necessary, some might be said in the fields. Extremes of 
asceticism are severely discouraged. ‘The monks are to have 
a midday meal and a light supper as well. The best sort 
of work is agriculture, but weaving, shoemaking, building, 
carpentering, and metal-working are also suitable for 
monks. 

A most striking feature of S. Basil’s precepts is their 
relative timidity. Monks must renounce their worldly pos- 
sessions, but the rules contemplate that some property may 
be retained. S. Basil himself enjoyed some income of his 
own till his death. This might perhaps have been on ac- 
count of the necessities of his position as Bishop of Czsarea, 

* Regulae fusius tractatae, 45. * Regulae fusius tractatae, 37. 


WORK OF 8S. BASIL AND HIS SUCCESSORS 45 


but wealthy monks are definitely warned not to make in- 
decorous display.’ 

Journeys are unsuited to the spirit of monasticism, but if 
they must be undertaken two had best travel together as a 
check on each other for the due performance of religious 
duties. Nothing but water may be drunk, except a little 
wine for the sake of health. Obedience must be absolute and 
permanent; to break the vow is sacrilege, yet if the monk 
has genuine grievances for which he cannot get redress he 
may leave the house without sin, for the brethren have be- 
come strangers. 

S. Basil very definitely prefers ccnobitic to eremitic 
monasticism, but instead of repudiating the latter altogether 
“he founded cells for ascetics and hermits, but at no great 
distance from his cenobitic communities, and, instead of 
distinguishing and separating the one from the other, as if 
by some intervening wall, he brought them together and 
united them, in order that the contemplative spirit might 
not be cut off from society, nor the active life be uninfluenced 
by the contemplative, but that, like sea and land, by an in- 
terchange of their several gifts, they might unite in pro- 
moting the one object, the glory of God.” § 

In reading the ascetic writings of Basil it is impossible 
to avoid the conclusion that considerable concession had to 
be made to human nature. Ideals have greatly to be tem- 
pered by the limitations of what was actually possible. 


™In one of his letters (CCLXXXIV), S. Basil asks an assessor to ex- 
empt monks from taxation as “if their lives are consistent with their 
profession, they possess neither money, nor bodies.” By their prayers 
the monks are able to secure the official’s salvation, so he will wish to 
regard them with special reverence. (Such arguments might fall a bit 
flat on the revenue collectors of the present day!) <A. Lenoir, Architec- 
ture Monastique, chap. i, p. 16,,says: “En 889, un moine de l’abbaye de 
Saint Pére de Chartres possédait un terrain aboutissant au cloitre de 
Vabbaye, et obtenait de l’evéque Aimeri la permission de le vendre & un 
autre religieux,” giving the reference Cartul: de 8S. Pére de Chartres, 
i, p. 16. This would indicate something similar in the West. 

®*Gregory N., Funeral Oration, sec. 62. 


4.6 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


Through every phase of Oriental monasticism we miss the 
iron discipline of Rome. 

Perhaps the greatest permanent achievement of 8. Basil 
was to bring European civilization to the help of what had 
been purely Asiatic.? The combination of Oriental thought 
with the organizing power of the West has given to the 
world very much of its very best. Asia has a vision of the 
vistas of eternity to which Europe cannot pretend; Europe 
has a practical ability that Asia can hardly comprehend. 

It was 8. Basil’s privilege to bring together the wisdom 
of Egypt and of Greece and to use both for the service of 
monasticism and the Church. S. Pachomius had adumbrated 
future developments by building a monastic organization 
parallel to that of the episcopate of the official church, and 
yet completely separate. S. Basil made the bishop his 
monastic superintendent and completely amalgamated the 
regular and the secular sides of the Church. The mon- 
asteries were to be as much a part of the organization of 
Christianity as the parish churches themselves, 

He was acutely conscious that the episcopate at that time 
stood in most serious need of such reformation as monasti- 
eism could give. “The very title of bishop has been con- 
ferred on wretched slaves, for no servant of God would choose 
to come forward in opposition. * * * At the town of 
Doara they have brought shame upon the poor name of 
bishop, and have set there a wretch, an orphans’ domestic, 
a runaway from his own masters, to flatter a godless 
woman.” 7° This gloomy view can be abundantly corrobo- 
rated from other sources; indeed the extremely poor char- 
acter of many of the bishops that he met a little later was an 
element in the apostacy of Julian, but it is necessary to 
make rather large allowances not only for S. Basil’s very 
natural animosity against the time-serving methods of 


° Kgypt, though in Africa, is, of course, Asiafic in its culture. 
10 Letter CCXXXIX, to Eusebius, Bishop of Samosata. 


WORK OF 8. BASIL AND HIS SUCCESSORS 47 


Arianising court bishops, but also for his undoubtedly strong 
aristocratic prejudices. 

Monasticism thus gave new strength and new enthusiasm 
to the whole Church. At the same time, the gradual estab- 
lishment of the principle that only celibate monks and not 
the married clergy could hold the highest places in the hier- 
archy was not at all satisfactory. The monk indeed in cen- 
turies to come was very often to show himself more qualified 
than any others to take his place in the rule of the world, 
but this was by no means invariably the case. 

The Western Church did better in throwing open all 
high offices to monk and secular alike. When monastically 
minded pontifis like Hildebrand (Gregory VII) imposed 
celibacy on all the clergy, the difference between seculars 
and regulars became far less important, though it was never 
blurred. 

S. Basil was quite right in feeling that in monasticism 
was by far the most hopeful influence for carrying out much 
needed Church reform. In some cases, at least, laymen felt 
exactly the same; the monk was during the fourth century 
upholding, on the whole, the best Christian influences there 
were. 

Socrates ** tells us how the devout emperor Theodosius 
the younger “rendered his palace little different from a 
monastery, for he rose early in the morning with his sisters 
and recited responsive hymns in praise of the Deity,” this 
throughout the centuries being the chief basis of monastic 
worship. At the same time, in company with others, Soc- 
rates finds much to condemn in the violent and unmannerly 
behaviour of many monks who came into the cities to take 
part in that disgraceful rioting about creeds that gave the 
world a sort of evil foretaste of the miserable wars about 
religion that were yet to be. 

Perhaps the most significant feature of the not very in- 


“ Hecles. Hist., VII, xxii. 


48 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


spiring post-Basilian period of Eastern monasticism is the 
fact that no real progress has been made since the great work 
S. Basil did. Compared with what we find in the West, 
reform movements have been rather feeble, though, much 
as in the story of almost all Kastern lands, revival has fol- 
lowed decay in lengthy sequence, without the development 
of any features really new. As with so many other inven- © 
tions of the East, monasticism was to have in the West a 
career out of all proportion to anything it achieved in the 
countries of its birth. 

Lowther Clarke distinguishes four periods in the story of 
Eastern monasticism between the days of S. Basil and the 
present year. During the first, the centre of interest has 
shifted from Egypt to Palestine and both ccenobitic and 
eremitic asceticism flourished side by side. Mar Sabbas and 
other famous solitaries came from S. Basil’s own province 
of Cappadocia. ‘This well-known leader restored the old 
Egyptian view that the hermit is a nobler figure than the 
cloister monk. ‘The theory was that by preparation in a 
monastery the monk might eventually be qualified to fight 
the devil all alone and thus to pass from glory to glory. 

Both eremites and ccnobites were controlled by archi- 
mandrites under the general jurisdiction of the patriarch, 
but sometimes there was a single head for both kinds of 
monks, On one occasion, Sabbas, who was Archimandrite 
of the anchorites, boasted to Theodosius, the superintendent 
of the cenobites: “My lord, you are a Superior of children, 
but I am a Superior of Superiors, for each of those under 
me is independent and therefore Superior of his own cell.” }? 

This kind of glory seems to have culminated in 8. Simeon 
Stylites, well known from Tennyson’s poem, who enjoyed a 
most extraordinary reputation. In him we recognise more 
strongly than ever the abiding influence of Asia. After 


*L. Clarke, 8. Basil the Great, p. 30, quoted from Vita Sabbae, p. 382. 
Holl, Enthusiasmus. 


WORK OF S. BASIL AND HIS SUCCESSORS 49 


ascetic records of many kinds, including the burial of his 
person up to the neck for many months, he became the most 
famous of pillar saints. He never descended from his con- 
stantly heightening column until at last he said his prayers 
and took his scanty food and troubled rest sixty feet above 
the plain. Enormous crowds of pilgrims from every corner 
of the world between Britain and Persia thronged the spot, 
while at the base of the pillar devout disciples watched, and 
counted how often the saint aloft spread out his arms in 
fervent prayer. Theodoret calls him “that great miracle of 
the world”; Evagrius “that angel upon earth.” 

But though he dictated some letters about the faith, he 
refused an urgent request from the emperor himself that he 
would use the boundless influence that his severe austerities 
had won for himself among the people to compose those 
miserable quarrels about Nestorianism that were almost ruin- 
ing the Church and seriously weakening the empire in its 
struggle with the unsleeping barbarian foes. Nothing can 
better prove the extent of the reverence that was felt for 
him than the fact that his body was taken to Antioch with 
more than imperial magnificence that it might be a protec- 
tion to that defenceless city; while around his pillar was 
erected one of the finest churches of the East. 

But to the Western world this particular type of saintli- 
ness made no appeal, and when an imitator tried to estab- 
lish himself near Trier the demolition of his pillar was 
ordered by an unimaginative and unsympathetic bishop.*? 

Whether this severe asceticism, this eschewing of every- 
thing that was beautiful, or pleasant, or even clean, was any 
real fulfilment of the law of Christ or any legitimate de- 
velopment of Christianity we are not concerned to ask; from 
the point of view of mankind it is impossible not to feel 
that Christian monasticism had in the fifth century reached 
its very nadir. Not only was it doing almost nothing for 

# Gregory of Tours, History of the Franks, IV, 32. 


50 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


the world; it would not even in any real degree utilize its 
vast forces in the service of the Church. 

But this point of view is wholly modern. To contempo- 
raries, solitaries were by their severe asceticism scaling the 
steep incline to heaven in unbroken communion with God. 
They saw no more. Religion was purely a matter for the 
individual, not for the community. This seems to be a very 
dominant spirit in all monastic literature up to, and indeed 
beyond, the day when Luther in trembling fear for his own 
salvation entered the Augustinian friary at Erfurt. 

Sozomen tells us how 8. Chrysostom definitely objected to 
monks trying to interfere in the business of the world, re-, 
garding that as quite outside their sphere. “John (Chrysos- 
tom) had several disputes with many of the monks, particu- 
larly with Isaac. He highly commended those who remained 
in quietude in the monasteries and practised philosophy 
there; he protected them from all injustice and solicitously 
supplied whatever necessities they might have. But the 
monks who went out of doors and made their appearance in 
cities he reproached and regarded as insulting philosophy. 

“For these causes he incurred the hatred of the clergy and 
of many of the monks, who called him a hard, passionate, 
morose, and arrogant man. ‘They therefore attempted to 
bring his life into public disrepute by stating confidently, as 
if it were the truth, that he would eat with no one, and that he 
refused every invitation to a meal that was offered him.” 14 
It certainly does not seem that the last complaint involved 
anything very damaging to the character of the Patriarch. 

In the second period the centre of interest shifts to Con- 
stantinople, whither many monks had gone, drawn like others 
into the vortex of the great capital. The first convents 
appear to have been founded in that city during the reign of 
Theodosius (375-395), though earlier claims have been made. 
The monks showed a disposition to support their opinions 

*Sozomen, Hecles. Hist., VIII, ix. 


WORK OF S. BASEL AND HIS SUCCESSORS 51 


in the numerous theological controversies of the metropolis 
rather by arm than by brain. Some evidently sympathized 
with the errors of Eutyches, himself a monk, whose views 
are held to this day by the ancient Church of Armenia 
(Gregorian). Accordingly, the Council of Chalcedon, in 
451, definitely placed monks under episcopal control, forbid- 
ding them to take any part in ecclesiastical or secular affairs 
“unless in case of necessity they are required to do so by the 
bishop.” It is a point of complaint that monks “go about 
in the cities indiscriminately.” +° This action was cer- 
tainly in line with 8. Basil’s reforms. 

Justinian, about the middle of the sixth century, tight- 
ened monastic discipline still further, but in exactly the same 
direction. The common life was made obligatory and any 
anchorite’s cell must be within the precincts of a monastery. 
The bishop must preside over the foundation of a new con- 
vent and supervise the election of the abbot, besides exer- 
cising a general jurisdiction. 

Thus the connexion between monasticism and the official 
Church was still further emphasized. The great Emperor, 
like others, appears to have failed to curb the meanderings 
of the hermits. Unfortunately the history of asceticism, like 
that of every other human institution, has frequently re- 
vealed wide differences between practice and theory. 

The Second Trullan Synod, so called because like the Sixth 
(Ecumenical Council it convened in the Trullan Hall of 
the imperial palace in Constantinople, in 692 decreed that 
no one under ten might become-a monk, that no one might 
inhabit a cell of his own till he had spent three years in a 
monastery, and that hermits might not frequent the streets 
of towns.’® Subdeacons, deacons, and priests may not send 
away their wives,’ but if anyone is consecrated bishop, 


* Canon 4, Hefele, History of the Councils of the Church, vol. iii, pp. 
389-390 (Eng. tr.). 

*% Canons 40-42; Jb., p. 229. 

Canon 13; Jb., p. 226. 


52 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


his wife must go into a convent at a considerable distance, 
the bishop still being liable for her support.7® 

Thus we find nearly completed the relations between the 
monastic and secular clergy that S. Basil had begun. If 
one of the latter must put’ away his wife on attaining the 
episcopate, there is no very wide step in retaining the higher 
offices for the monastic clergy altogether. 

A most unlooked-for endorsement of Christian monasti- 
cism about this time is to be found in the Koran. Those 
most friendly to the true believers are the Christians: “This 
cometh to pass because there are priests and monks among 
them and because they are not elated with pride.” 1° 

In the third period, there was a strong movement (such 
as later occurred in the West) to claim for monks exemption 
from all episcopal control below that of the Patriarch of 
Constantinople himself. The centre of interest shifts to the 
great metropolitan monastery which was attached to the 
Church of the Studion, so called from its founder, an ex- 
consul named Studius. The date of its erection was about 
463. It was served by the Akoimetai or sleepless monks, 
who by dividing their number into choruses kept up unceas- 
ing service, both by night and day. 

Toward the end of the eighth century the house had 
fallen on evil days. Its inmates numbered but ten. These 
were the times when the iconoclast emperors had attempted 
to reduce the Church to a mere department of the State, and 
the brunt of the battle fell upon the monks, who were far 
less inclined than the secular clergy to yield. Theodore, the 
Hegumenos of Studion, undertook a most vigorous reorgan- 
ization of the monastery, largely under the influence of 
S. Basil’s ascetic writings. His ideals included important 
social work. Education for the young and hospital care for 


* Canon 48; Jb., p. 230. 
® Koran, Sura V. Sale’s trans., vol. i, p. 147; Chicago ed. (1 vol.), 
p. 128. 


WORK OF S. BASIL AND HIS SUCCESSORS 53 


the sick were provided within the institution. The poor were 
helped by pastoral care, sometimes with gifts of money. 
Prisoners were visited. Funeral rites were performed. At- 
tention was devoted to the careful copying of manuscripts, 
one of the greatest services to mankind that monks were 
ever to perform. 

Theodore tried to abolish the distinction which had grown 
up between monks of the little habit and the great. The 
latter was a longer and ampler cloak which was granted to 
older monks as a mark of particular dignity ; it was solemnly 
put on with a sort of renewal of vows. But the hegumenos 
was chosen from among the little habit whose duty it was 
to carry on both the practical work of the convent and the 
entertainment of the guests, thus leaving the elder brethren 
entirely free for the higher duties of contemplation. Theo- 
dore maintained that as there is but one baptism, so it was 
fitting that there should be but a single habit for all the 
monks. 

The influence of the reformed Studion spread to the whole 
orthodox world, especially to the two great centres of monas- 
ticism that were developing at Kiev and on the peninsula of 
Mount Athos. 

During the tenth and eleventh centuries were erected the 
remarkable monasteries of Meteora in Thessaly, which, 
perched high upon their beetling crags, only to be reached 
by ropes, formed some protection against the invading deluge 
of the Slavs. This is some evidence of the patriotic part the 
monk was playing even in the decaying civilization of the 
East. 

The fourth period is largely connected with Mount Athos, 
the famous rocky promontory rising above the Augean, which 
forms the oldest of all Christian monastic states (p. 189). 
From the sacred mountain are excluded all females, includ- 
ing even the beasts. Hermits seem early to have gathered 
on the spot, then many monasteries came into being, and in 


54 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


the tenth century, one bearing the honoured name of Atha- 
nasius organized the whole community on Studion lines. 
Thus hermits became less honoured than the cloister monks. 
Organized as a sort of monastic republic, the ascetic com- 
munity tried to claim independence of the outside world 
till in 13812 the Emperor placed the protos of the mountain 
directly under the Patriarch of Constantinople. 

In 13874, we first hear of the disastrous idiorrhythmic 
system which cuts at the very root of monastic ideals by 
permitting each monk to retain his property and to live as 
he can afford in the convent, almost as though occupying 
quarters in a modern apartment hotel. It has been found 
that under such a plan the monk will usually keep his own 
little garden better and do harder work than under the cceno- 
bitic system where all are taking their part in the general 
community life.?° 

By the prescription of centuries, monks have at present 
complete control of the Eastern Church, whatever may be 
the eventual outcome of the movements of the present day. 
The fact is perhaps largely responsible for the rather sleepy 
and unprogressive atmosphere of Orthodox Christianity. Yet 
to call this ascetic community through the ages barren of 
all good works would be superficial and indeed libellous 
in the very highest degree. 

Through the weary centuries of Moslem rule it was monks 
in no small measure that still kept hope alive in the breasts 
of Greek, Armenian, and Slav, and that preserved from com- 
plete extinction some lamps of Christian culture that are 
now again beginning to burn less murkily than they did of 
old. Monks again in northern Slavdom helped to preserve 
the spirit of Russia from being completely extinguished by 
the deluge of miscreant Mongols. Monasticism has shared 
to the full the suffering and the dogged pertinacity of the 
Christianity of the East. 

* Athelstan Riley, Athos, or the Mountain of the Monks, p. 379. 


WORK OF S. BASIL AND HIS SUCCESSORS 55 


Of the utmost value to mankind must be the system that 
in our own day has produced (to mention but one monk from 
each of the three great races that call the Orthodox Church 
their mother) Bryennios, the lettered Greek, who discov- 
ered the Didache and did much.other learned work; Nikolai, 
the Russian bishop, who so superbly carried the Gospel to 
Japan and raised a great church to dominate a whole sec- 
tion of Tokio, its Byzantine domes seeming specially in 
place in that great Oriental metropolis, and another Nikolai, 
the saintly Bishop of Ochrida among the southern Slavs, 
whose preaching in the present day seems to have some- 
thing of that deep Eastern mysticism that we specially as- 
sociate with Christ. 


BIBLIOGRAPHY: 


The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, con- 
tains: vol. VII, the Letters and many works of Gregory Na- 
zianzen, including the Funeral Oration on S. Basil; vol. VIII, 
the Letters and other works of S. Basil. 

Migne, P. G. XXIX-X XXII for the complete works of Basil. 
A good modern study of S. Basil is E. F. Morison’s St. Basil 
and his Rule; a first-rate one, W. K. Lowther Clarke, St. Basil 
the Great, a study in monasticism. 

For the general subject of Eastern monasticism, J. M. Besse, 
Les Moines dOrient; J. O. Hannay, Spirit and Origin of 
Christian Monasticism; A. Harnack, Monasticism; Curzon, Visits 
to Monasteries of the Levant; Miss A. Gardner, Theodore of 
Studium. 


CHAPTER ITI 
THE FIRST MONKS OF THE WEST 


Were we concerned alone with monasticism on the far 
side of the Adriatic, it would be but an interesting phase 
in the long and stirring story of the Church. Secular his- 
tory would be relatively but little affected. It is impossible 
to point to any important feature of the civilization of Greek 
or Slav and to say: ‘This would be completely other than 
it is but for the fostering care of the monk.” 

When we turn to the West, we find a different scene in- 
deed. Monasticism has here become a mighty driving force. 
A culture has arisen that might not have raised its head 
at all, and would at least have been far different; better, 
perhaps, but far more likely worse but for the monks being 
there to Christianize the order of the earth, When Rome 
fell, the Christian world fell too, save where, here and there 
among the craggy steeps of Irish hills, or by wide peaty 
streams on Irish bogs, the monk still read, and wrote, and 
thought and taught, and that in a country where the gen- 
eral population has too often in every age been very differently 
employed. 

And when at last on the European mainland a new culture, 
Catholic and Christian, was being reared, it was monks 
that laid the foundations, and by monastic hands for the 
most part that the glorious fabric was raised. 

Monasticism in the East is a remarkable, but not an en- 
trancingly interesting, phase in the history of the Church. 
Monasticism in'the West was the greatest single constructive 
force that existed in the world for a thousand years after 
the fall of Rome. 

56 


THE FIRST MONKS OF THE WEST 57 


Nevertheless, the first beginnings of Western monasticism 
appear to have been tinged with heresy. Priscillian, a Span- 
iard of position and wealth, about the year 375 attempted 
to reform the Church on lines of asceticism, but he fell into 
heresies of Gnostic and Manicheean character. 

The Synod of Saragossa, called to deal with his errors 
in 380, showed itself distinctly suspicious of monasticism 
itself. Among other things, it was ordered that a cleric 
who out of pride becomes a monk, as being a better observance 
of the law, shall be shut out from the Church.t No virgin 
may take the veil under forty years of age.” 

The first outstanding figure of Western monasticism is 
S. Basil’s contemporary, the noble S. Martin (316-396), sol- 
dier-saint, monk-bishop of Tours. The great impression that 
he left in his own and succeeding generations is well shown 
by the large numbers of churches that bear his name in all 
parts of Western Europe, including the ancient oratory of 
Queen Bertha at Canterbury, the church that S. Ninian 
built at Candida Casa,* and a chapel erected by S. Bene- 
dict at Monte Cassino, besides an immense number of parish 
churches, particularly in England and France. 

Even remote Iona has its S. Martin’s Cross. His capella 
or little cloak was so valued a relic as to give the name of 
chapel to the oratory that was provided for it by the Mero- 
vingian kings. Sozomen mentions him as the earliest prom- 
inent monk among the Thracians, Illyrians, and other Eu- 
ropean nations.* 

An admirable account, which must be called ecstatically 
appreciative even among ecclesiastical biographies, is con- 
tained in the “Life of St. Martin,” and other works, by his 
younger contemporary, Sulpicius Severus, one of his closest 

*Canon 6. 

?Canon 8. C. J. Hefele, History of the Councils of the Church (tr. by 
H. N. Oxenham), vol. ii, p. 293. 

7See Bede, H. E., bk. III, ch. iv. 

‘ Eccles, Hist., I, xiv. 


58 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


friends. This is the original authority for the famous story 
of how Martin, a soldier in the service of the empire, while 
yet only a catechumen, divided his cloak with the beggar 
to whom he had nothing else to give.° His dream on the 
following night in which Christ appeared clothed in the 
rent garment evidently changed the whole course of his life; 
almost at once he left military service and devoted himself 
to religion. 

A battle with the barbarians appeared to be imminent. 
Julian Cesar (p. 46) was in the midst of his triumphant 
career in Gaul. He was presenting his troops with a spe- 
cial donation, and this was the occasion that S. Martin 
chose to abandon the military career. The future emperor, 
perhaps not unnaturally, considered the time ill-judged, and 
though S. Martin volunteered to expose himself in the battle, 
unarmed, he was thrown into prison. As the enemy, how- 
ever, at the same time sued for peace, S. Martin was at 
once released. 

However much we may sympathize with the standpoint 
of those who against the most discouraging odds were seeking 
to retrieve the fortunes of the tottering empire, Workman is 
perfectly right in saying that no one can read the life by 
Sulpicius without falling in love with its rough, tender- 
hearted hero. §. Martin is one of the most attractive of 
the noble company of monastic saints, and that is saying 
very much. 

After being admitted to the diaconate by Bishop Hilarius, 
S. Martin encountered roving adventures with a brigand, 
whom he converted, with Arian heretics by whom he was 
grievously ill-treated, and with the devil himself, to whom 
he promised salvation if only he would repent,’ thus antici- 
pating Robert Burns by more than fifteen hundred years. 


5 Life, by Sulpicius Severus, ITT. 

* Evolution of the Monastic Ideal, p. 102. 

* Life, by Sulpicius Severus, XXII. The incident is reported to have 
taken place after he was Bishop of Tours. 


THE FIRST MONKS OF THE WEST 59 


This was, however, repudiated as serious error by the great 
bulk of his own contemporaries. 

Deciding to embrace the monastic profession as the best 
fulfilment of the Christian law, S. Martin founded a con- 
vent at Milan. There, as indeed wherever he went, he gained 
a most extraordinary reputation, and when the bishopric 
of Tours fell vacant ‘an incredible number of people not 
only from that town but also from the neighbouring cities 
had in a wonderful manner assembled to give him their 
votes.”” ® 

Unlike most monks at that early time 8S. Martin was 
already in holy orders and as bishop he continued to live 
his customary monastic life. Eighty other recluses dwelt 
with him in caves by the banks of the Loire. Many of these 
afterwards became bishops, “for what city or church would 
there be that would not desire to have its priests from among 
those in the monastery of Martin?’® It is characteristic 
of the whole tenor of Western monasticism that its first prom- 
inent leader was not content merely to make new records 
in asceticism. 

S. Martin may almost be said to have set a new stand- 
ard of what should be expected from a bishop. Exceedingly 
diligent in visiting every part of his scattered diocese he 
was everywhere composing quarrels, healing the sick, giving 
comfort to the dying. He worked all sorts of miracles by 
which many of the still heathen inhabitants of Gaul were 
converted to the faith. 

With the usurping Maximus, who held his court at Trier, 
S. Martin was on friendly terms, but his influence was not 
sufficient to prevent that rude adventurer from putting Pris- 
cillian to death. He evidently admired the courage and inde- 
pendence of the monk who on one occasion handed a drink- 
ing cup to a priest before he passed it to the Emperor,’® a 
most refreshing improvement on the shameless obsequious- 

* Life, by Sulpicius Severus, IX. (De saall Casnpre. 0. 


60 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


ness that so very often characterized the court prelates of the 
East. 

We certainly get the impression, and very strongly, in 
reading 8. Martin’s life that under his inspiration monasti- 
cism was furnishing the Church with a better and far more 
self-denying type of priest than was usually to be found 
among the secular clergy of the time. Many of them ap- 
pear to have been most unsatisfactory. As Sulpiciys Sev- 
erus says: “What power and dignity there were in Martin’s 
words and conversation! How active he was, how practical, 
and how prompt and ready in solving questions connected 
with Scripture!” “Even when he appeared to be doing 
something else he still was engaged in prayer. O truly 
blessed man in whom there was no guile—judging no man, 
condemning no man, returning evil for evil to none. 

“He displayed, indeed, such marvellous patience in the 
endurance of injuries that even when he was chief priest he 
allowed himself to be wronged by the lowest clerics with 
impunity; nor did he either remove them from office on 
account of such conduct, nor, so far as in him lay, repel 
them from a place in his affection.” His very last act was 
to travel to Condate in order to compose the squabbles of 
certain contentious priests. And this good work done, he 
peacefully passed away among the sorrowing monks. 

Sulpicius is clearly very anxious to show that in S, Mar- 
tin the West had now a monk who could in every way chal- 
lenge comparison with the most virile athletes of the Kast— 
though hig hero was born in that portion of the empire 
(Pannonia). It is noteworthy as illustrating the extending 
respect felt for the monastic profession in itself at this time 
that Sulpicius “ records that S. Martin was conscious that 
no such abundance of power was granted him as a bishop 
as he possessed while yet a simple monk. 

As a monk, indeed, he is reported to have raised two peo- 

* Dialogues, Il, ch. iv. 


THE FIRST MONKS OF THE WEST 61 


ple from the dead; as a bishop only one. The general 
atmosphere of the “Life of Martin” is very much the same 
as that of S. Antony himself. Nearly all the real emphasis 
is on asceticism. On one occasion, seeing a green field, S. 
Martin was impelled to preach a little monastic sermon by 
comparing the beauty of the untouched grass and flowers 
to virginity, the parts eaten down by cattle to marriage, and 
the portion grubbed up by swine to fornication.}? 

S. Martin had quite as many encounters with devils as 
any of the ascetics of the East, but that in the West these 
were not taken with quite the same unquestioning faith as 
in the East is indicated by the matter of Brictio, a priest, 
who took most necessary discipline in very bad part, re 
torting that S. Martin “had now entirely sunk into dotage 
by means of his baseless superstitions and ridiculous fancies 
about visions.” 7% To Sulpicius, S. Martin is before all 
things a monk, the equal in piety to any that were ever 
known elsewhere. To us, he is far more—one of the pio- 
neers of the Western tradition that made monks the most 
practical men of affairs. 

Contemporaries of S. Martin and destined to an even 
larger share of fame, were the two great Fathers of the 
Church, 8. Jerome and S. Augustine. Both were monks. 
Both very deeply impressed their character on later monastic 
ideals. An order of canons and another of friars followed 
the Augustinian rule. The writings of S. Jerome were 
almost the Bible of later asceticism. 

Yet Augustine, the monk, is completely overshadowed by 
Augustine, the theologian, the author of the “City of God.” 
Of all the Fathers, East or West, none ever exercised quite 
the same influence on Christian thought. Not merely was 
he perhaps the chief inspiration of the medieval school- 


2 Dialogues, II, ch. x. 
* 70. ALE Xv- 'S. Martin once saved a hunted hare from the dogs in 
the ancient spirit of monastic sympathy with beasts, Dialogues, II, ix. 


62 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


men, but it was to him again, far more than to any one 
else, that Calvin and other reformers turned. His writings 
are not as a general rule primarily concerned with asceti- 
cism. And yet it appears to have been monastic discipline 
itself that eventually turned this wandering soul, the de- 
spair of his mother, the long-time prodigal, the Manichean 
hearer, into the Christian faith. 

In his famous conversation with Pontitianus, a great 
light burst upon him. He realised that by his wonderful 
discipline the most common monk was able to bridle his 
passions in a manner that the great philosopher could not; 
could likewise discover a peaceful calm that was denied to 
one of the most brilliant scholars of his age. S. Augustine 
had realised in the most literal way one of the great truths 
of time, that in the quiet cloister spread that peace of God 
surpassing all understanding that the utmost treasure of 
this world could not give. 

The famous rule of 8. Augustine is based on relatively 
“unimportant portions of his works, especially “Letter” 221, 
and, to a less extent, “Sermons” 355,356. The letter is 
addressed to the nuns of the convent of which his sister 
had been Prioress; it was occasioned by noisy demonstra- 
tions of disgust with her successor, but besides reproofs, it 
contains much practical advice. 

The life that nuns should lead is based on Acts, iv. 32-35, 
the common sharing of the early Christians.1* Sisters who 
have given up great riches, and those who have in the con- 
vent the necessaries of life which they could not afford in 
the world, are bidden to be friendly and free from pride. 
“Tt is better to have fewer wants than larger resources. * * * 
Aspire to please others by your behaviour rather than by 
your attire. * * * Let your hair be worn wholly covered, 
and let it neither be carelessly dishevelled nor too scrupu- 
lously arranged when you go beyond the monastery; * * * 

4S. Augustine, Letter 221, sec. 5. 


THE FIRST MONKS OF THE WEST 63 


neither let your desires go out to men nor wish to be the 
object of desires on their part.” 25 

The convent has both a prioress and a prior, the latter 
apparently the chaplain. The nuns must honour the Prioress 
as a mother and “still more is it incumbent on you to obey 
the presbyter who has charge of you all.” *® The nuns go 
to the public church besides having their own oratory. 
Everything is to be in common, even clothes and gifts from 
parents. Baths are to be taken and clothes washed once a 
month. The washing is to be done by the religious or by 
washerwomen. Not less than three sisters are to go to the 
baths together to avoid the possibility of scandal. The let- 
ter itself is to be read once a week.*7 ‘There will always 
be reading during meals.*® Manuscripts are to be avail- 
able for private study, to be changed during regular hours 
each day. ei 

Unlike those of 8S. Augustine, the writings of S. Jerome 
(c. 340-420), are almost purely monastic. With his superb 
erudition and his most admirable translation of the Scrip- 
tures, he stands out as the great father of monastic learning, 
the first of the great monk-scholars that have so lavishly con- 
tributed to the knowledge of the world, and that by no means 
solely on the subject of monastic lore. 

Born on the confines of East and West at Stridon, near 
Aquileia, his career belongs to both, but his point of view 
is unmistakably Western. He ranks as one of the four 
great doctors of the Latin Church. In his works, we cer- 
tainly see a notable advance in the standard of the scholar- 
ship that is enlisted in the service of monasticism. He is 
clearly conscious of a certain lack in the literature of the 
desert, particularly in its eternal stories of conflict with 
devils. 

On this subject he writes with withering scorn in a letter 
to Rusticus, a monk of Toulouse, whom he exhorts not to 

5 Ib., secs, 9-10. 16 1b., 15. 71b., 16. 2 Ib., 8. 


64 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


become an anchorite. Writing in 411, he says: “Do I con- 
demn a solitary life? By no means; in fact I have often 
commended it. But I wish to see the monastic schools turn 
out soldiers who have no fear of the rough training of the 
desert, who * * * are too conscientious to invent (as some 
fools do) monstrous tales of struggles with demons, designed 
to magnify their heroes in the eyes of the crowd and before 
all to extort money from it.” 1° 

Rusticus is advised to be diligent in gardening and other 
labour; likewise he is exhorted to construct a hive for bees 
that he may “learn from the tiny creatures how to order a 
monastery and to discipline a kingdom.” The prophecy as 
to future monastic activities contained in the last four words 
is certainly unconscious, but we are clearly finding a new 
point of view from that of the desert monks. 

Sadly watching the Roman world fall into ruin from his 
retreat at Bethlehem, not even there safe from barbarian 
forays, S. Jerome finds much with which to console himself 
in the spread of ascetic ideas. Sometimes his enthusiasm 
literally boils over, as when in 414, writing to Demetrias, a 
lady of high birth in Rome, he narrates the effects of her 
recently made vow of virginity: “Good Jesus! What ex- 
ultation there was all through the house. * * * My words 
are too weak. Every church in Africa danced for joy. 

“The news reached not only the cities, towns, and villages, 
but even the scattered huts. Every island between Africa 
and Italy was full of it; the glad tidings ran far and wide, 
disliked by none. Then Italy put off her mourning and the 
ruined walls of Rome resumed in part their olden splendour; 
* * * You would fancy that the Goths had been annihi- 
lated and that that concourse of deserters and slaves had 
fallen by a thunderbolt from the Lord on high. 

“There was less elation in Rome when Marcellus won his 
first success at Nola after thousands of Romans had fallen at 

” Letter CXXV, sec. 9. 


THE FIRST MONKS OF THE WEST 65 


the Trbeia, Lake Trasimenus, and Canne. ‘There was less 
joy among the nobles cooped up in the Capitol, on whom the 
fate of Rome depended, when, after buying their lives with 
gold, they heard that the Gauls had at length been routed. 
The news penetrated to the coasts of the East, and this tri- 
umph of Christian glory was heard of in the remote cities 
of the interior.” °° 

It is easy to smile at such flamboyant exaggeration, but 
yet impossible not to sympathize with S. Jerome’s unlimited 
enthusiasm for monasticism. In fostering its growth, he was 
truly building far better than he knew. The glories of the 
monastic profession, the immeasurable superiority of celi- 
bacy to marriage, are ever his radiant themes. Indeed, he 
can hardly keep to any other subject for long. 

It can, perhaps, hardly be claimed that his own ideals of 

love are high. Of the dignity and nobility of motherhood as 
exemplified in the old Roman matron he appears to have no 
conception at all. Love in its ordinary sense is for him just 
one of the vanities of this wicked world. 
_ In the same letter to Demetrias he exhorts: “Avoid the 
company of wedded women who are devoted to their hus- 
bands and to the world, that your mind may not become 
unsettled by hearing what a husband says to his wife or a 
wife to her husband. Such conversations are filled with 
deadly venom.” #1 

Not a few of S. Jerome’s references to marriage are 
couched in language that to moderns seems highly indeli- 
cate. In discussing the marriage of the clergy he bases a 
long argument on the thesis that it is impossible for anyone 
living in ordinary wedlock to pray,?” and this he treats as 
self-evident and gives no proof at all. 

In his work on the “Perpetual Virginity of the Blessed 
Mary” ** he says that only in celibacy can the perfect Chris- 


*” Letter CXXX, sec. 6. 2 A gamst Jovinianus, bk. I, 34. 
7 7b., sec. 18. * Sec. 23. 


66 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


tian life be found. “I do not deny that holy women are 
found both among widows and those who have husbands; 
but they are such as have ceased to be wives, or such as, even 
in the close bond of marriage, imitate virgin chastity.” 

S. Jerome’s enthusiasm for strict monastic celibacy leads 
him to rather unlooked-for sympathy with many features of 
the non-Christian world. “Heathen errors invented. the vir- 
gin goddess Minerva and Diana and placed the Virgin among 
the twelve signs of the Zodiac, by means of which, as they 
suppose, the world revolves. It is a proof of the little esteem 
in which they held marriage, that they did not even among 
the scorpions, centaurs, crabs, fishes, and Capricorn, thrust 
in a husband and wife.” *4 

Further east he finds much satisfaction in the virgin birth 
of Buddha *® (whom he calls the founder of the Gymnoso- 
phists) and on the death of an Indian he explains that the 
favourite wife “having put on her former dress and orna- 
ment lies down beside the corpse, embracing and kissing it, 
and to the glory of chastity despises the flames which are 
burning beneath her. I suppose that she who dies thus, 
wants no second marriage.” *° 

To a Spaniard named Lucinius, who had vowed to live 
apart from his wife, he writes with characteristic enthusi- 
asm: “‘You have with you one who was once your partner 
in the flesh but is now your partner in the spirit; once your 
wife but now your sister; once a woman but now a man; 
once an inferior but now an equal.*? 

Every verse of Scripture, if properly interpreted, shows 
for S. Jerome the superiority of celibacy to marriage. One 
might conceive difficulties in so reading the Old Testament, 
but S. Jerome is fully equal to the task. He begins in the 


* Against Jovinianus, bk. I, sec. 41. 
57b,, I, 42. (No such claim is made in the earliest accounts of 


Buddha’s life.) 
*7b., I, 44. ) 
1 Letter LXXI, sec. 3. 


THE FIRST MONKS OF THE WEST 67 


very first chapter of Genesis, and writing from Bethlehem 
in 393, or 394, to Pammachius 8 he points out that in the 
account of the creation concerning the work done on the 
second day, we are not told, as of that of the other days, that 
God saw that it was good. ‘We are meant to understand that 
there is something not good in the number 2, separating us 
as it does from unity and prefiguring the marriage tie.” 
Many similarly convincing proofs are given from premises 
quite equally unpromising. Marriage is chiefly useful for 
bringing virgins into the world. “Virginity is to marriage 
what fruit is to the tree, or grain to the straw.” 7° He fre- 
quently and freely admits that marriage is superior to for- 
nication, but that without the slightest enthusiasm, and he 
will not go any farther. 

He does not feel any responsibility for the obvious objec- 
tion to his teachings, that the world would be in poor shape 
supposing they were seriously followed by the more civilized 
portion of mankind, or even if in the empire itself all the 
noblest and most thoughtful individuals were to refuse the 
responsibilities of parenthood. He does, however, say that 
virginity is a hard matter and therefore rare.*° 

As a hermit and recluse S. Jerome is little interested in 
public affairs. His few political references are by no means 
remarkable for their statesmanlike view. He is, of course, 
as conscious as his contemporaries that the Roman world is 
falling and the empire hopelessly doomed. 

His writings are of the very greatest value as giving inci- 
dentally what is possibly the most graphic account we have 
of the Roman peoples during the very latest days in which 
the great empire remained substantially intact, yet doomed 
beyond any possibility of revival, but the picture is embedded 
in enormous accumulations of material that has far less 
human interest. “Every day we are being cut down by war, 


% Letter XLVIII, sec. 19. Toe BG. 
» Against Jovinianus, bk. I, sec. 3. 


68 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


snatched away by disease, swallowed up by shipwreck, 
although we go to law about the fences of our property.” 1 

It is a very rare household in which pleasure is taken in 
other things than “the beating of drums, the noise and clatter 
of pipe and lute, the clanging of cymbals,” and “the half 
naked victims of the passions,” in a luxurious atmosphere 
of “smooth sofas, swept pavements, flowers and feasts,” 3? 
On one occasion when the barbarians had made Bethlehem 
unsafe, S. Jerome had to take refuge on shipboard, for the 
empire still controlled the Mediterranean. 

All the more remarkable that in such an atmosphere as 
this the monk could make so huge a contribution to the 
literature of the world. As the translator of the Vulgate, 
and in his other learned works, 8. Jerome has influencea 
medieval and modern Christianity more, perhaps, than any 
other of the Fathers. 

To the Church of Rome he has given her official version 
of the Scriptures. He recognized Papal claims as amply as 
any one could wish. The English Church has accepted as 
final his definition of the place of the Apocrypha. ‘And 
the other books (as Hierome saith) the church doth read for 
example of life and instruction of manners, but yet doth it 
not apply them to establish any doctrine.” %% 

Outside the Scriptures and theology, 8S. Jerome’s knowl- 
edge was vast, though rather uncritical. Despite the vision 
in which he was sternly rebuked as being a follower of 
Cicero and not of Christ,** he is inclined to repudiate the 
common monastic doctrine that only Christian literature is 
fit study for Christian minds. He very often quotes the 
classics and displays sympathy with such Roman heroes as 
Cato the censor.*° 

S Lorpetual Virginity of Blessed Mary, 23. 

Waris VI. Book of Common Prayer. 


*% Letter XXII, sec. 30, to Eustochium, A.D, 384,: 
*% Letter CXXX, sec. 13, 


THE FIRST MONKS OF THE WEST 69 


S. Jerome, in the true spirit of the monk, feels largely 
indifferent to the misfortunes of the world because his true 
home is heaven. He never dreamed that his words would 
reach a far distant posterity, because he had no conception 
that it ever would exist. In him it is impossible to feel that 
monasticism had yet reached a point where it could do very 
much for the world. 

And yet his writings were destined to be classics in the 
monastic circles of the West, second only to Scripture and 
S. Benedict’s rule. He would have been the very last to 
think that from the movement he so well loved was to rise 
one of the greatest and most virile constructive forces that 
the world has ever known, quite as powerful as the demo- 
cratic tradition of Greece, as compelling in its sphere as the 
imperial spirit of eternal Rome. 

The more we study the foundations of the building, the 
more we marvel that it was ever raised so high. Greece 
and Rome built nobly on principles universally admired; 
monasticism did a great work for the world in spite of every 
ideal with which it set out upon its way. 

In all the West, in early times, no convent was more 
renowned than that which §. Honoratus founded in 410, 
during those dark days in which the legions were withdrawn 
from Britain and the feeble Honorius skulked amid the 
marshes of Ravenna instead of bravely defending the mighty 
battlements of Rome. The new religious house was built 
on an island off the Riviera coast, at Lerins, for protection 
from barbarian hordes. 

It is characteristic of the spirit of the West that this, 
almost its first great monastery, at once became a centre of 
church life, a nursing mother of saintly bishops and pastors 
for the mainland, a school of Christian scholarship that did 
great things for the faith; not merely a place where monks 
wrestled with devils and saved their own souls. 

S. Vincent of Lerins, the greatest ornament of that great 


70 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


house (with which Cassian also was connected **), is of 
interest as the first prominent Western monastic writer, if 
we except Sulpicius Severus, who was of West European 
birth. By race he was a Gaul; of his life but little is known; 
his character is most charmingly and entirely unconsciously 
portrayed for us by himself in his setting forth of the faith 
known as the ‘“Commonitorium.” ‘This admirable treatise 
was written “in the seclusion of a monastery situated in a 
remote grange,” sometime between the Council of Ephesus 
in 431, and the death of S. Cyril of Alexandria in 444. 

It is a monument of gentle reasonableness, seeking to 
moderate with essentially Western conciliation the furious 
passions which theological discussion was so apt to stir up 
in the turbulent councils of the East. We must take our 
stand, he says, on Scripture interpreted by the traditions 
of the Catholic Church. And this faith is that which has 
been believed everywhere, always and by all. We must not 
follow individuals, not even though it were an angel from 
heaven, except as we see them following the Catholic doc- 
trine of the Church. It behooves us to have a great dread 
of the crime of perverting the faith and adulterating 
religion.** 

Novelties must most emphatically be shunned. It is a 
terrible trial to the Church that Origen, the most brilliant 
of the Greek Fathers, and Tertullian, who among the Latins 
was equally distinguished, should both in different ways 
have erred from the purity of the faith. 

Development may be allowed, but this must be as the 
rosebud grows into the rose; nothing must be added, nothing 
taken from the truth. It is right that ancient doctrines of 
heavenly philosophy be cared for, smoothed, polished; but 

* Another famous Lerins monk was Lupus of Troyes, who in 429 ac- 
companied Germanus to Britain to stamp out the Pelagian heresy. 
Their triumphs and the famous Halleluiah victory are detailed in Con- 


stantius’ Life of Germanus. 
7S. Vincent of Lerins, Commonitoriwm, 20. 


THE FIRST MONKS OF THE WEST 71 


not changed, nor mutilated, nor maimed. “They may re 
ceive proof, illustration, definiteness; but they must retain 
withal their completeness, their integrity, their character- 
istic properties.” 38 

It is remarkable that the great name of S. Augustine is 
absent from S. Vincent’s references to the defenders of the 
faith. Like others of the school of Lerins he has been ac- 
cused of semi-Pelagianism, but in this direction he can 
hardly have gone very far, for with language more violent 
than is his wont he denounces “an ephemeral, moribund set 
of frogs, fleas, and flies such as the Pelagians.” *° 

On the whole, S. Vincent’s “Commonitorium” is the most 
profoundly reasoned discussion of the faith that the early 
Church has handed down, and if the happy day of Chris- 
tian reunion shall ever come it is difficult to see how a more 
entirely satisfactory platform could possibly be devised. 

It seems probable that the so-called Athanasian Creed, 
whose authorship is unknown, was composed by some person 
or persons connected with the Lerins school. This is cer- 
tainly not the place to enter into the fierce controversies it 
has aroused, but it may be pointed out that it is a very early 
example of that passion of the West for exact definition of 
what the more cautious East preferred to treat as undefin- 
able. The West was steeped in Roman law; the mind of the 
East was moulded by the philosophy of Greece. In handing 
religious leadership to monks both were agreed. 

Thus the last dark days of the falling empire in the West 
were brightened by the rising light of monasticism. In the 
days when the ancient world of Rome was obviously nearing 
its end, no names shine brighter than those of monks, whether 
in Church or State. The secular world of their days has no 
leaders to place above Martin, Vincent, Cassian, Jerome, 
and Augustine. And when the empire had fallen and bar- 
barian chieftains sat in the seats of the Cesars, it was monks 

8 1b,, 57. »1b., 26, 


72 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


once more that undertook the noble task of rebuilding the 
civilization of the world. 

Revival was not sudden, nor was it steady nor sure, but 
when a monk ascended the throne of S. Peter the Papacy 
received its brightest ornament, and modern civilization its 
earliest constructive statesman. ‘True indeed it is that the 
career of Gregory the Great derives its chiefest interest from 
the picture it presents of a hero struggling against bewilder- 
ing odds in the darkest ages of Europe. The dawn of the 
brilliance of the Middle Ages was still far off, many weary 
centuries of ruin had yet to be. 

But Monk Gregory had lit a torch which never quite went 
out, and four centuries after he was dead it blazed up into 
one of the most brilliant cultures that the world has ever 
known—romantic, beautiful, and picturesque, while Chris- 
tian to the core. da during early medieval years monastic 
leadership was hardly called in doubt. 


BIBLIOGRAPHY: 


The chief sources for this chapter are printed in the admir- 
able Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers: vols. I-V1III, First series; 
the works of S. Augustine, including Letters; vol. VI, Second 
series, Letters and the more important works of S. Jerome; vol. 
XI, Second series, Sulpicius Severus, Life of Martin, Dialogues 
and other works. Vincent of Lerins, Commonitorium. 

Each volume contains Prolegomena, a very good life of the 
writer concerned and some account of the condition of the world 
at the time he lived. 
ee Patrologia Latina, XXXII; Possidius, Life of Augus- 
ine. 

Other guides are: Cooper Marsden, History of the Islands of 
the Lerins; Cunningham, St. Austine and his place in the 
history of Christian Theology; Martin, Life of St. Jerome; Far- 
rar, Lives of the Fathers, vol. II, pp. 159-459; on Monasticism and 
Asceticism, Augustine and Jerome. 

More general works on the subject of this and succeeding chap- 
ters: Milman, Latin Christianity, a book far more fair to the 
monks than was at all usual in the great early Victorian scholars; 
Count de Montalembert, Monks of the West, a work taken almost 
wholly from Mabillon, a French Benedictine of the congregation 


THE FIRST MONKS OF THE WEST 73 


of S. Maur. It shows how completely monasticism dominates 
Church history in this era that very much of the work reads like 
a general, and not merely a monastic, record of events. Gibbon’s 
famous Ch. xxxvii (in vol. III) of The Decline and Fall of the 
Roman Empire should be read, but not necessarily accepted as 
fact. Writing in the eighteenth century in a British atmosphere, 
seems to have been fatal to any appreciation of monasticism as a 
constructive force. At the end of that period Bp. Warburton 
could refer to “The Antiquarian, who delights to solace himself in 
the benighted days of monkish owl-light”; Charge to the Clergy 
of the Diocese of Gloucester, Works, 1X, 376, and that though he 
might behold one of the noblest works of monks whenever he 
entered his own cathedral. 


CHAPTER IV 
S. BENEDICT 


Several of the names with which we have been concerned 
are most prominent in the story of the Church. One or two 
have an assured place in the general literature of mankind. 
But, so far, we have not been concerned with what most his- 
torians would consent to regard as the chiefest events in the 
annals of the world. 

It is interesting to find Abbot Butler beginning the 
preface to his most valuable and suggestive work on ‘“Bene- 
dictine Monachism” with the sentences: “Violet-le-Duc has 
said: ‘Regarded merely from the philosophical point of view, 
the Rule of 8. Benedict is perhaps the greatest historical 
fact of the Middle Ages.’ Great authority though he was 
on the Middle Ages, there may be some demur in accepting 
this verdict.” 

The modesty of the ex-abbot ? is engaging, but it hardly 
seems to be called for. The very shortest list of the 
world’s great statesmen must include S. Benedict’s, name. 
He stands with Julius Cesar as the chief moulder of one of 
the great civilizational organizations of past years. If we 
would see things in their true proportion in the light of real 
historical perspective—religion wholly apart—it must appear 
that Hannibal, or Napoleon, or even Alexander, left a smaller 
dent on the general story of mankind. 


Quoted from Dictionnaire de Vv Architecture, I, 242. 
*Dom. Butler was Abbot of Downside at the time he wrote the book; 
he has subsequently resigned. 


74 


S. BENEDICT 75 


By him a candle was lighted that was Europe’s chief 
lantern for a thousand years, and which has never ceased to 
burn. Even if it be an exaggeration to say that the culture 
of the Middle Ages was what the Benedictines made it, no 
rational person will maintain that any other voice was quite 
so powerful as theirs—certainly none nearly so pervasive. 
Not an institution that stood in the Middle Ages but re- 
ceived much inspiration from monks; not a feature of im- 
portance in that virile civilization that would not have been 
vastly different but for monastic work. Yet no one ever 
less designed the edifice he reared. At any rate, from the 
standpoint of the world it was not apparent for centuries 
after his death that S. Benedict had done so much. 

Carlyle would not let us brush away the hero with the 
observation that he was moulded by circumstances quite as 
much as he moulded them, that in fact had he not lived, 
another must have done substantially the very things he 
did. This is true enough, for if Carlyle overrated the per- 
sonal force in history, others have exaggerated the economic, 
exceedingly great as that is. 

Yet in a sense it must be admitted that this early monasti- 
cism was such a vital force, and by its very constitution in 
early days so far more communal than individual that, even 
without the guiding hand of S. Benedict, it must have pro- 
duced some legislator to fit it for so great a task. 

That, like many another conscientious labourer, S. Bene- 
dict built far other than he knew is not to be denied. What 
he essayed to do was to guide certain poor men that were 
tired of the world and in despair of life, to the portals of the 
still land beyond; what he accomplished was to train the 
men that should rebuild as a splendid fabric the structure 
of a culture that was roofless and in ruin. 

Every schoolboy knows, but Columbus never did, who it 
was that discovered America; and so we all realize today 
something of S. Benedict’s place in human story, but he had 


76 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


not the vaguest conception of the true significance of the 
work he wrought. 

Despite the noble work of S. Martin and Cassian and the 
pervading influence of the holy house of Lerins, there is 
much reason to believe that Western monasticism was in 
very sorry plight when it was brilliantly and permanently 
restored by the nursing hand of S. Benedict. He is one of 
the not inconsiderable number of men whose lives stand out 
in all the greater brilliance against the general darkness of 
the age between the fall of Rome and the rise of medieval 
culture. 

Born at Nursia about the year 480, just after the Goths 
had overthrown the last feeble representative of the greatest 
political tradition of mankind, §. Benedict received a good 
education and spent some time in Rome. It was perhaps the 
saddest period in the age-long story of that most famous 
town, and he found its atmosphere, both morally and other- 
wise, entirely uncongenial. 

So he retreated to a lonely cavern in the district of Subiaco 
to live the life of a hermit. It is very safe to say that it 
never occurred to him that he was the destined restorer of 
much of the greatness of the city he had left. His severe 
austerities, combined with his cultured bearing, won him a 
multitude of friends. 

As in the case of other early monks, his life was singularly 
unsacramental, and on one occasion it required a special 
miracle to let him know when it was Easter Day. 

So little attention did he pay to his personal appearance 
that once some shepherds mistook him for a wolf and were 
about to try to kill him when, discovering their error, they 
knelt in horrified and penitent reverence, most humbly ask- 
ing his pardon. 

Attracted by his growing reputation, the monks of a 
neighbouring monastery, at Vicovaro, elected him their 
Abbot. His vigorous efforts to enforce a worthy discipline 


S. BENEDICT 17 


were so little to their taste that they actually attempted to 
poison him. This miserable episode does not seem to have 
been particularly unique, so far from the ideals of 8. Martin 
had the monks of the West fallen. 

So S. Benedict returned to his cave. Disciples flocked 
around him, among the best known being 8S. Maur. He 
founded a dozen convents, but he suffered much from ene- 
mies, particularly from a secular priest. 

So he turned his steps to the southward and stopped about 

eighty miles on the other side of Rome. Amid the battered 
ruins of a little hill town called Cassinum, where there are 
still ancient walls that antedate Latin work, he founded a 
convent that was destined to have a unique place among all 
the monasteries of the West, though in wealth and 
even in actual power it was to be outdistanced by 
abbeys in richer lands (p. 134). It was for the great 
house of Monte Cassino that the Rule of S. Benedict was 
delivered. 
_ It is not necessary to be a monk to find in this superb 
piece of writing something that is not to be discovered in 
any other work of the authors of the early Church. Our 
Holy Father, as Benedictines love to call their pious founder, 
displays an honest friendliness and a spirit of reasonable- 
ness that are really exceedingly attractive. Though it is, of 
course, written entirely for monks, it seems to have a message 
for all. 

The Rule is exceedingly ingenuous and simple. 8S. Bene 
dict is perfectly unconscious that he is legislating for a new 
world. He simply desires that, persisting in His teaching in 
the monastery till death, he and the other monks may by 
patience share in the sufferings of Christ and deserve to be 
partakers in His kingdom.* As James Hannay has put it: 
“The Benedictine rule aimed at making good men and left 
the question of their usefulness to God; it is, perhaps, just — 

* Prologue to the Rule. 


78 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


because they denied themselves the satisfaction of aiming at 
usefulness that they were so greatly used.” 

It is often stated that the Rule was planned purely for the 
abbey of Monte Cassino and that it was merely because of 
its intrinsic excellence that it spread so far beyond. ‘This 
may be the case, but the provision in Chapter IV about 
clothing being given to the brethren suited to the climate of 
the place where they are, appears to indicate that a wider 
use was contemplated. 

S. Benedict begins by enumerating four different sorts 
of monks, and of the first two classes he expresses like 
S. Basil, a strong preference for ccenobites over hermits. 
Sarabites, who live by twos and threes, he strongly con- 
demns, accurately foreseeing, what bishops’ registers a thou- 
sand years later amply confirm, that very small monasteries 
were apt to become corrupt (p. 242). Two or three monks 
living together are far more likely tacitly to agree to modify 
the rule than a community of a dozen or more. 

Gyratory monks, or monastic tramps, sponging on the 
hospitality of one religious house after another, come in for 
yet stronger strictures, and quite equally deserved. There 
may have been good men among them, but as a class they 
_ were singularly worthless. After describing them as spend- 
ing their time wandering about, with no stability, given up 
to their own pleasures and to the snares of gluttony, S. Bene- 
dict remarks that it is better to say no more of their wretched 
lives. S. Benedict as a monastic reformer certainly did not 
appear before he was needed. 

The abbot must do nothing of importance without calling 
the whole house together and hearing what each has to say 
(p. 190). The chapter house was to be one of the greatest 
of monastic institutions.* 


‘The word “chapter” is familiar to Americans from its use by various 
academical societies, particularly the Phi Beta Kappa. It is used of the 
clergy of a cathedral as well as of the monks of a convent in council. 


S. BENEDICT 79 


Obedience must be strict. “Therefore let all, straightway 
leaving their own affairs and giving up their own will, with 
unoccupied hands and leaving incomplete what they were 
doing—the foot of obedience being foremost—follow with 
their deeds the voice of him who orders.” 

Night office is to be said and also the other canonical 
hours. These frequent services all through the day, con- 
sisting very largely of singing the Psalms of David, have 
always been the main occupation of the monk. The entire 
psalter is to be said weekly, beginning on Sunday at vigils. 

There are to be deans to assist the abbot, “elected accord- 
ing to merit of life and advancement in wisdom.” (The 
dean is properly the tenth man but through monasticism the 
term has come to be used in many other senses, particularly 
in colleges. ) 

Monks are to have separate beds, all, if possible, in one 
cell. A candle is to burn there all night, all are to sleep in 
their clothes girt with belts, but without their knives for 
fear of accidents. (In all medieval monasteries, with 
hardly an exception, the dormitory was a long gallery with 
a door into the church for the convenience of the monks 
attending the night office. ) 

The cellarer is to be ‘“‘wise, mature in character, sober, 
not given to much eating, not proud, not turbulent, not an 
upbraider, not tardy, not prodigal, but fearing God; a 
father, as it were, to the whole congregation. He shall take 
care of everything, he shall do nothing without the order 
of the abbot. * * * To the brethren he shall offer the fixed 
measure of food without any haughtiness or delay, in order 
that they be not offended.” The abbot must keep a list of 
all the property of the house. 

A monk “should have absolutely not anything; neither a 
book, nor tablets, nor a pen—nothing at all. For indeed it 
is not allowed to the monks to have their own bodies or wills 
in their power.” 


80 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


“The brothers shall so serve each other in turn that no 
one shall be excused from the duty of cooking, unless either 
through sickness, or because he is occupied in some important 
work of utility. 

“Before all, and above all, attention shall be paid to the 
eare of the sick, * * * and for these infirm brothers a cell 
by itself shall be set apart. * * * The use of baths shall be 
offered to the sick as often as it is necessary; to the healthy, 
and especially to youths, it shall not be so readily conceded.” 
The infirmaries are usually important and singularly well 
arranged parts of medizval monasteries. Probably few lay- 
men got as good care in sickness. In this as well as in their 
sanitary arrangements the monks were pioneers. 

Nothing can better illustrate the power of the Christian 
Church about the time of 8. Benedict than the fact that it 
was able to abolish an institution so well established in the 
life of the Roman world as the bath. Travelling in remote 
parts of Italy today one often feels that if an ancient Roman 
were to return to the scenes that once he knew, the absence 
of the public baths would impress him more than almost 
anything else.) 

“At the tables of the brothers when they eat the reading 
shall not fail; nor may any at random dare to take up the 
book and read there; but he who’ is about to read for the 
whole week shall begin his duties on Sunday; * * * he shall 
receive bread and wine before he begins to read. 

“We believe, moreover, that for the daily refection of the 
sixth as well as the ninth hour two cooked dishes * * * are 
enough for all tables.” “Indeed we read that wine is not 
suitable for monks at all. But because in our day it is r 
possible to persuade the monks of this, let us agree at | 
as to the fact that we should not drink till we are sated 
sparingly. 

“As soon as the signal for the hour of divine servi: 
been heard, leaving everything that they have in han 


S. BENEDICT 81 


monks shall run with the greatest haste; with gravity, how- 
ever, in order that scurrility may find no nourishment. 

“Tdleness is the enemy of the soul. And, therefore, at 
fixed hours, the brothers ought to be occupied in manual 
labour; and again at fixed times in sacred reading. 

“The oratory shall be that which it is called; nor. shall 
anything else be done or placed there.” (This rule is taken 
from Letter 221, sec. 7, of S. Augustine. He tells us the 
reason—that the chapel might ever be available for private 
prayer. Churches during the Middle Ages were frequently 
used for purposes of all kinds; an interesting relic is the 
case of certain academic functions that still take place in 
the university churches at Oxford and Cambridge. ) 

“All guests who come shall be received as though they 
were Christ. * * * The kitchen of the abbot and the guests 
shall be by itself; so that guests coming at uncertain hours, 
as is always happening in a monastery, may not disturb the 
brothers. 

“The table of the abbot shall always be with the guests and 
pilgrims. As often, however, as guests are lacking, it shall be 
in his power to summon those of the brothers whom he 
wishes.” (Thus the Rule itself contemplates a position for 
the abbot that prepared the way for his very extensive outside 
activities. In most important houses the abbot had a separate 
residence and there was also a “guesten” hall. When the 
abbot had to undertake many duties as a great feudal lord, 
he was often away from his convent for long periods, and 
under the evil commendatory system ceased to have any real 

* connexion with it at all.) 
ag No monk may receive a letter or any gift except through 
“83 abbot, and he may give it to any other monk than the 
So to oe it is addressed. 
Ube any newcomer applies for conversion,® an easy 


fois is the common technical word for becoming a religious; that is, 
er of some religious order. 


82 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


entrance shall not be granted him; * * * if he who comes 
perseveres in knocking, and is seen after four or five days 
patiently to endure the insults inflicted upon him, and the 
difficulty of ingress, and to persist in his demand, entrance 
shall be allowed him.” He must remain for all his life in the 
same monastery. (This constitutes S. Benedict’s ideal of 
stability, a most marked improvement on the restlessness 
that monks had too often displayed.) 

“At the door of the monastery shall be placed a wise old 
man who shall know how to receive a reply and to return 
one; whose ripeness of age will not permit him to trifle. 

‘“‘A monastery, moreover, if it can be done, ought so to 
be arranged that everything necessary—that is, water, a mill, 
a garden, a bakery—may be made use of, and different arts 
be carried on, within the monastery; so that there shall be 
no need for the monks to wander about outside.” (This was — 
usually managed in the case of large houses in the country. 
Inevitably changes had to be made when it became common 
that Benedictine houses should be situated in cities.) 

Artificers may, with the abbot’s permission, practise thei1 
art, but if they think they do it very well they must be put tc 
some other work. Articles so made by the monks may be 
sold. “In the prices themselves, moreover, let not the evil 
of avarice crop out; but let the object always be given a little 
cheaper than it is supplied by other and secular persons; so 
that in all things God may be glorified.” 

Such are the main outlines of a simple but extraordinarily 
well thought out Rule. Very much is based on the work of 
former monastic legislators; there is no striving whatever 
after originality. S. Benedict, however, brings to the task 
the organizing ability of Rome. The Abbot’s rule is based 
upon the patria potestas, and the rule about stability 
makes each abbey a permanent family whose members are 
removable only by death, at least in all ordinary circum- 
stances. 


S. BENEDICT 83 


Thus good order takes the place of the indescribable chaos 
that had too often reigned before. An exceedingly impor- 
tant contribution in the days when the degenerate world of 
Rome wished to relegate all work to slaves is the insistence, 
in the true spirit of a Ruskin, upon the dignity of manual 
toil—“‘laborare est orare.” 

It was inevitable that ascetic communities practising such 
a rule should evolve an efficiency of a high order, but nothing 
was ever less designed than the monument to the wisdom of 
their holy Father that the Benedictines erected through many 
centuries. As Abbot Butler expresses it: “How far have 
Benedictine history and work in the world, and, it may be 
said, Benedictine ideas, gone beyond anything that can have 
been in St. Benedict’s mind. 

“How little he thought that his monks were to be apostles, 
missionaries, civilizers, schoolmasters, editors of the Fathers. 
How surprised would he have been at the figure of a me- 
dizeval mitred abbot, a feudal baron, fulfilling the functions 
of a great landlord and of a statesman. How bewildering 
to him would have been the gorgeous church functions and 
the stately ceremonial that have become one of the most 
cherished traditions among his sons.” ® 

It is remarkable that with all his Roman taste for organiza- 
tion S. Benedict made no effort to set up a regular order 
according to the traditions of Pachomius, nor sought in any 
way to bind his other monasteries to Monte Cassino. Each 
convent of his disciples is independent under its own abbot, 
a separate family with only fraternal relations with the 
other Benedictine houses. 

The common sense and inherent excellence of the Rule 
caused it eventually to oust all others throughout the West. 
Particularly after a few centuries it superseded the far more 
rigid, but less well-ordered Celtic Rules, especially that of 
Columbanus (p. 179). As Dr. Workman remarks: this 

‘ Hibbert Journal, 1906, p. 490. 


84 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


“simply bristles with punishments.”7 None knew better 
than 8. Benedict that the furious ascetic records of the child- 
hood of monasticism could not possibly be maintained 
throughout the centuries. Of all possible monastic Rules 
none is less ascetic than his own. 

Abbot Butler points out that “the general conditions of 
life were probably not rougher or harder than would have 
been the lot of most of the monks had they remained in the 
world.” § This undoubtedly is true through the ages. From 
Domesday statistics F. W. Maitland calculated that a monk 
drank on an average at least a gallon of beer every day,® and 
there is certainly no evidence that the amount grew subse- 
quently less. It required the vigorous insistence of William 
the Conqueror to force his monks to erect their house on the 
ridge at Battle instead of in a balmier spot lower down. 
Innumerable other instances might be given. 

Despite far less spectacular beginnings, Western monasti- 
cism was nevertheless destined to reach an incomparably 
higher standard of value than was ever attained in the East. 
Far more impressive than Benedictine austerities have been 
Benedictine services to mankind. 

Yet all this glory has been called by Benedictines them- 
selves ‘‘by-products.” However great, however long drawn 
out, perhaps, after all, this work for the world was only a 
passing phase. It is certainly impressive to find Abbot 
Delatte writing: “Save in cases of necessity—and superiors 
should strive prudently to reduce their number—we have no 
reason to meddle with apostolic works, social questions, or 
politics. St. Benedict has bidden us only employ the tools 
of the spiritual craft, and these in the cloister.” 1° 

One of the best known of living French monks, in fact, 
bids his Benedictine brethren forget the history of a dozen 

7 Avolution of the Monastic Ideal, p. 207. 

5 Benedictine Monachism, p. 32. 


° Domesday Book and Beyond, p. 440. 
7 Commentary on the Rule of St. Benedict, p. 82, English edition. 


S. BENEDICT 85 


centuries and return to the simple ideals with which the great 
order began its long career. 


BIBLIOGRAPHY: 

The chief authority for the life of S. Benedict is the Dialogues 
of S. Gregory the Great, printed in Migne, P. L. 66. 

Excellent modern accounts are contained in Thomas Hodgkin’s 
Italy and her Invaders, bk. V. ch. xvi; Coulton’s Five Centuries 
of Religion, vol. I, Chap. xii; Workman’s Evolution of the 
Monastic Ideal, Chap. iii; Abbot Butler’s Benedictine Monachism; 
Canon Hannay’s Spirit and Origin.of Christian Monasticism; and 
Gregory Smith’s Christian Monasticism. 

ere authors approach the subject from widely different points 
of view. 

Abbot Delatte’s Commentary on the Rule of St. Benedict, 
is a work of much charm, remarkable for its views of abbatial 
absolutism. The author shows very little interest in the history 
of the order. This work contains the whole of the Rule, which 
is in part printed in many source books of medizval history. 

For life in a medieval monastery: Dean Spence, Cloister Life 
in the Days of Ceur de Lion; E. L. Taunton, The English 
reed Monks of St. Benedict, largely about S. Augustine’s, Can- 
terbury. 


f 


CHAPTER V 


MONK REBUILDERS OF A WORLD 


When in 590 8S. Gregory the Great was forced to leave his 
much loved convent of S. Andrew on the Ceelian Hill and 
to mount the Papal chair, his own peace of mind may have 
suffered very much—as he tells us it did—but one of the 
greatest of all its traditions was given to the world. 

It was shown that in the studious recesses of the cloister 
there had been evolved a new efficiency that the outside 
world of the ruined empire had long ceased to know. Not 
that S. Gregory had no other background himself. Born of 
a patrician family, he had served the State with honour and 
held the high office of prefect of Rome. But it is as a monk, 
and that a sterling good one, that he figures in the story of 
the world. A monk, rich indeed in experience, but desti- 
tute of material force, displayed an organizing power in 
purely secular affairs that few of the world’s great statesmen 
have excelled. 

Dark days indeed for Europe were in store and the dawn 
of the real cultural revival of the Middle Ages was centuries 
away. But 8S. Gregory had made a beginning of better 
things. At least he showed Europe whence her rebuilding 
was to come. Unlike the earlier doctors of the Western 
Church (Ambrose, Augustine and Jerome), he had no classi- 
cal background. As a Christian and a monk? he faces the 


*T cannot accept modern doubts as to whether S. Gregory was a monk. 
As well might we discuss the problem as to whether Napoleon was a 
soldier. His whole soul was monastic. 


86 


MONK REBUILDERS OF A WORLD 87 


future. In all the learning of the past he sees nothing but 
pagan darkness. 


It was from a quarter so unexpected that the new order 


was to come that contemporaries could hardly be expected 
to realize that the cloister rather than the court, the recluse 
rather than the man of affairs, was to raise up the civiliza- 
tion to be. The like had never been before. The general 
trend of earlier monasticism had not been very constructive. 

But as Professor Foakes Jackson points out: “A new spirit 
had come into the world which completely changed the old 
order. With the cessation of persecution the monastic move- 
ment had begun: and of the Middle Ages it may be said that 
everybody was a monk at heart, in the sense that no man 
was so usefully employing his life for the benefit of others 
but he acknowledged that the summons of the monastery 
or of the hermit’s cell was a call to better things, and 
even sinners believed that repentance could most surely be 
found in the self-torture of solitary asceticism. To all 
men the monastic life represented the highest goal on this 
earth.” ? 

It can hardly be too strongly emphasized that while severe 
mortification was indeed the keynote of Oriental monasti- 
cism, the monks of the West almost at once took their place 
as practical men of affairs. They did not claim that tremen- 
dous self-denial with which they have not infrequently been 
credited. At any rate, in all ages we have plentiful dis- 
claimers. 

The religious were always very fully conscious of the wor- 
ries and anxieties of married life from which their own pro- 
fession set them free. There have ever been monks and nuns 
avowing themselves what we should now call confirmed 
bachelors, who rather looked with compassion on the woes, 
than with envy on the delights, of married life. 

S. Jerome speaks in his famous letter to Eustochium about 

*An Introduction to the History of Christianity, a.v. 590-1314, p. 4. 


> 


88 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


“the drawbacks of marriage, such as pregnancy, the crying 
of infants, the torture caused by a rival, the cares of house- 
hold management, and all those fancied blessings which 
death at last cuts short.” * This is all the more striking 
because the context is the proper motives for taking the vow 
of virginity. In the twelfth century, we have the remark- 
able Norman Prior’s door in Ely Cathedral, which displays a 
satire on wedded life, beginning with an affectionate pair 
kissing, and ending with their sitting in the same boat, one 
rowing, the other backing. 

A well-known story of 8S. Francis of Assisi records his 
making a wife and children and servants of snow and 
then congratulating himself that if he serves God alone 
he will be .free from all the anxieties and cares of 
providing clothes and other necessities for such a house- 
hold.* 

The same ideas are expressed with yet more pungent satire 
in “Holy Maidenhood,” a work of the thirteenth century: 
“And how, I ask, though it may seem odious, how does the 
wife stand, who, when she comes in hears her child scream, 
sees the cat at the flitch, and the hound at the hide? Her 
cake is burning on the stone hearth, her calf is sucking up 
the milk, the earthen pot is overflowing into the fire, and the 
churl is scolding. Though it be an odious tale, it ought, 
maiden, to deter thee more strongly from marriage, for it 
does not seem easy to her who has tried it. Thou, happy 
maiden, who hast fully removed thyself out of that servi- 
tude as a free daughter of God and as His Son’s /spouse, 
needest not suffer anything of the kind.” ® And we have the 

* Letter XXII, sec. 2. 

*Thomas of Celano, Leg. II, ch. 82. S. Bonaventura, Legende due 
de Vita 8. Francisci, chap. v, sec. 4. (Quaracchi ed., p. 48.) A similar 
story, but with mud instead of snow, will be found in Verba Seniorwm, 
auctore probabili Ruffino Aquileiensi presbytero, printed in Migne, P. L. 
73, col. 747 (copy). 


5’ Hali Meidenhad, edit. Cockayne, Early English Text Society, 1866, 
p- 37. The author is unknown. 


— 


MONK REBUILDERS OF A WORLD 89 


testimony of a modern abbot that Benedictine life at the 
present day is not one of great austerity.® 

S. Gregory the Great was certainly under no delusions 
whatever as to the real condition of the Roman world. In 
reply to a letter of congratulation on his election as Pope he 
wrote to John the Faster, Patriarch of Constantinople: “It 
is evident that you do not love me as yourself, seeing that 
you have wished me to take on myself that load which you 
were unwilling should be imposed on you. But since I, un- 
worthy and weak, have taken charge of an old and griey- 
ously shattered ship (for on all sides the waves enter, and the 
planks, battered by a daily and violent storm, sound of ship- 
wreck), I beseech thee by Almighty God to stretch out the 
hand of thy prayer’ ‘“—since at Constantinople he can pray 
in peace. 

Nothing stands out more clearly than the fact that this 
government of the world was not sought by the quiet cloister, 
but in the first place, at any rate, forced upon its reluctant 


inmates. To Narses, the Patrician, S. Gregory writes: “In 


describing the sweetness of contemplation, you have renewed 
the groans of my fallen state, since I hear what I have lost 
inwardly while mounting outwardly, though undeserving, to 
the topmost height of rule. 

“Know then that I am stricken with so great sorrow that I 
can scarcely speak. * * * For I reflect to what a dejected | 
height of external advancement I have mounted in falling 
from the lofty height of my rest.” ® To the Emperor’s sister 
he writes in the same terms. In many places in his writings 
S. Gregory displays a longing for the quiet peace of the 
cloister as far superior to the turmoil of the world. He feels 


*See the very interesting ch. xxii in Abbot Butler’s Benedictine Mon- 
achism. He virtually says that sound scholarship is far better worth 
seeking to attain than any great asceticism. Incidentally he gives one a 
very great respect for his own character. 

™ Hpistles of St. Gregory the Great, bk. I, Ep. iv. 

®Ib., Hp. vi. 


90 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


that he has left a delightful haven to be tossed about on the 
stormy waves of an uncongenial sea. 

S. Gregory sought neither the Papacy nor temporal 
power. Both were forced upon him by the absence of any 
possible alternative. No real administration of Italy was 
to be expected from the feeble Exarch at Ravenna, the pale 
representative of the once powerful Emperor. 8S. Gregory 
alone was in a position to do something—and it was not very 
much—to restore some semblance of ordered life. Despite 
the fact that, as his own letters show, the state of the Western 
monasteries left something to be desired, 8. Gregory’s policy 
' was as far as possible to use the monks both to restore pros- 
perity to what remained of the empire and to extend the 
Gospel among the barbarians (p. 177). 

The smallest matters, such as the rights of individual peas- 
ants on Church lands, received his closest attention. For 
the development of the huge estates that belonged to him, 
especially in Sicily, he provided by the foundation of monas- 
teries. In the extreme uncertainty of those unhappy times 
when Lombards, as yet untutored,? were making havoc of 
Italy, and other barbarians of all sorts were tearing away so 
many provinces of the empire, few ordinary laymen pos- 
sessed the energy or the confidence to seek to repair the 
damages of devastating wars. Whether the spiritual chil- 
dren of 8. Benedict soared so very far above the general level 
of the secular clergy in pure morality is a far more arguable 
thing than the fact that they were now the chief rebuilders 
of Western Europe. 

It was largely because the monks, and they alone, pos- 
sessed the skill, the capital, the organization, and the faith 
in the future to undertake large projects of reclamation 

° Few, or none, foresaw at that time how great things the “unspeak- 
able” race was eventually to accomplish through its very presence, a 
vigorous northern brood of tremendous virility and energy on the north- 


ern plains of Italy. For centuries their descendants have been chief 
leaders in Italian progress. 


MONK REBUILDERS OF A WORLD 91 


over fields long desolated by the slave system of Roman 
villa life and later the tramp and retramp of barbarian 
hordes. 

The times were so disturbed that secular men might well 
hesitate to sow the crops whose fruits they might never see, 
but the monks’ real home was heaven, and if all the founders 
of a monastery were dead there would be others to take their 
places. They could carry on agricultural and other works 
upon a scale absolutely beyond the reach of the wealthiest 
individual. Immense tracts of barren heath and of water- 
soaked fen were by monastic hands turned into excellent agri- 
cultural land. Many a great abbey, such as S. Benet, Holm, 
in Norfolk, which stands today amid smiling fields and rich 
cornlands, was built originally on the self-same spot in the 
centre of barren desolation. 

It is impossible to conceive any agents better qualified to 
restore cultivation and the arts of peace to the desolated 
European world than the ascetic communities who might 
bring to the task the organization of numbers, the enthusiasm 
of religion, and the feeling that it was no matter how long 
their schemes of betterment might take to come to maturity, 
because their monasteries could never die. 

As Newman expresses it: “St. Benedict found the world, 
physical and social, in ruins; and his mission was to restore 
it in the way, not of science, but of nature, not as if setting 
about to do it, not professing to do it by any set time or by 
any rare specific or by any series of strokes, but so quietly, 
patiently, gradually, that often, till the work was done, it 
was not known to be doing. It was a restoration, rather 
than a visitation, correction, or conversion. 

“The new world which he helped to create was a growth 
rather than a structure. Silent men were observed about the 
country, or discovered in the forest, digging, clearing, and 
building; and other silent men, not seen, were sitting in the 
cold cloister, tiring their eyes, and keeping their attention 


92 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


on the stretch, while they painfully deciphered and copied 
and re-copied the manuscripts which they had saved. 

“There was no one that ‘contended or cried out,’ or drew 
attention to what was going on; but by degrees the woody 
swamp became a hermitage, a religious house, a farm, an 
abbey, a village, a seminary, a school of learning, and a 
city. Roads and bridges connected it with other abbeys and 
cities, which had similarly grown up; and what the haughty 
Alaric or fierce Attila had broken to pieces, these patient, 
meditative men had brought together and made to live 
again,” 1° 

There are many European towns which originally grew 
up around monasteries. Most of them are relatively small, 
but a few, such as Peterborough, England, have grown into 
big cities. | tad 

S. Gregory the Great had turned into a convent his ances- 
tral palace upon the Ccelian, and there he himself dwelt as 
a monk, finding such a life extremely congenial. He dedi- 
cated the place to S. Andrew, but it now bears his own name 
and is known as S. Gregorio. 

When in 581 the Lombards plundered Monte Cassino, the 
monks came flying to Rome and founded another house by 
the Cathedral of Rome, the Lateran Basilica. Hither from 
their example or independently, and perhaps before they 
arrived, S. Gregory established the Benedictine rule in his 
own abbey on the Celian Hill. It is obvious, however, that 
the rule must have been modified, at any rate in some degree, 
for a convent in the middle of a city (p. 82). 

The work of 8. Gregory was never lost, but after he had 
passed away, the European world was in little better state 
than it had been before. From the barbarians themselves 
there came the next great rebuilder of the West. Charles 
the Great (Charlemagne), brilliantly restored the empire, 
and his coronation at Rome on Christmas day, 800 a.p., was 

*° Mission of S. Benedict, sec. 9, in Historical Sketches, II, p. 410. 


MONK REBUILDERS OF A WORLD 93 


the virtual foundation of the great structure of medizvalism. 
The new empire, holy and Roman, that was set up that day 
lasted in fact till the time of the Renaissance (when Charles 
V was the last sovereign who was really in any sense the 
ruler of Europe), and in theory till it was ended by Napo- 
leon,? in 1806. 

_ It was again very largely to monks that Charles the Great 
had recourse in his civilizing work for the world. Einhard, 
his friend and biographer, had been educated in the convent 
of Fulda and was ever a great admirer of monasticism. In 
old age he himself took the vows. Other prominent courtiers 
were the sovereign’s cousin, Adalhard, the Abbot of Corbey, 
and Angilbert, another monk who took the part of Homer 
when the denizens of the palace at Aachen each acted the 
part of some ancient worthy, the sovereign himself being 
King David. Alcuin, on whom he chiefly relied for his edu- 
cational reforms, does not appear to have been a professed 
monk, but he owed everything to the monastically inspired 
culture of his native Northumbria. Charles made him 
Abbot of Tours, but this may have been an early example of 
that commendatory system that was afterwards to prove a 
chief solvent of monasticism. 

One of Charles’ soldiers had his mind so turned to sacred 
things by a narrow escape from drowning that he became a 
monk. In religion he is known as Benedict of Aniane, from 
a monastery that he founded in a gorge above that river in 
Aquitaine. Louis the Pious, on his succession to his father’s 
dominion, invited him to the capital and made him abbot of 
a monastery close by. 

S. Benedict presided over the council of Aachen (817) 
which was largely concerned with much needed reform of 
monastic discipline. He had been so perfectly appalled by 


“The matter was complicated but this is substantially true, though 
barons of the Holy Roman Empire still exist, and the title “Emperor of 
Austria” had been substituted for the higher one a little before 1806. 


94 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


the conditions that confronted him that he contemplated re- 
introducing the strict discipline of the East. The council, 
however, under his guidance, turned in the more hopeful 
direction of a restoration of the Benedictine Rule. Attempts 
were also made to impose upon all the clergy some rule 
based upon Chrodegang’s reforms (p. 96). Imperial in- 
spectors were to be charged with the duty of enforcing a 
cast-iron uniformity upon all monasteries, a strange new 
departure that very soon passed away. 
_ Undoubtedly something was accomplished, ‘but as the 
work of the great Charles was undone by the relative feeble- 
ness of his successors, it was not easy for the cloister to rise 
entirely superior to the disorders of the world. However 
much corruption there may have been, we hear nothing of 
any decay of monastic energy. The foundation of the great 
house of Cluny in 910 (p. 123) was to bring most vigorous 
new life. 

Monks were constantly finding new methods of serving 
the world. 

One of the very greatest works performed by Rome had 
been the building of that net of splendid roads that gave 
relatively easy communication throughout the whole extent 
of the empire. Many of the old imperial highways still 
formed the chief thoroughfares of Europe, but the system 
naturally fell to pieces as a result of barbarian invasion. 
Many of the medieval travellers were pilgrims and the 
monks were soon keenly interested in providing for keeping 
open communications. 

Conspicuous in this work was S. Bernard of Menthon 
who in 962 built a hospice amid the Alpine snows for the 
benefit of travellers on the great roads into Italy. The dogs 
that bear his name still commemorate his methods of bring- 
ing first aid to those who had been overcome with fatigue. 

But while it was chiefly instrumental in moulding the 
whole civilization of the West during the early medieval 


MONK REBUILDERS OF A WORLD 95 


period, it is remarkable that monasticism did not dominate, 
nor identify itself with, the official Church as was coming 
to be the case in the East. The houses of the monastic 
orders, though nearly always subject to the bishops, formed 
as a rule no part of the diocesan and parochial system of the 
Church. 

Secular and regular clergy had their own separate organi- 
zations which met only in the sovereign pontiff himself. It 
is true indeed that the monks were gradually ceasing as a 
rule to be laymen. Abbot Butler believes that about the 
tenth century the custom became established that monks 
should be ordained, and this led to their abandoning work 
in the fields for more sedentary occupations.’” At an earlier 
period it seems to have become the custom that the abbot 
should be ordained, and if the head of the convent was a 
layman he was merely called the prior. There is a letter 
from S. Gregory the Great to the Bishop of Naples directing 
that for the present a certain monk, Barbatianus by name, 
- shall be Prior of a convent not named. He suffers unfortu- 
nately from being ‘“‘exceedingly wise in his own conceit,” but 
has “good qualities that commend him.” If the Bishop finds 
him worthy he is to ordain him Abbot, otherwise to defer his 
ordination and report to Rome.*? Of course this may have 
been exceptional, but the context seems rather to show that 
an abbot was ordained as a matter of course. 

But even when ordained, monks as a rule did ‘not min- 
ister to laymen. ‘The parish churches which architecturally 
formed part of the monasteries and those that were appro- 

22 Benedictine Monachism, p. 294. The question is discussed at some 
length and the statement is made on the authority very largely of Ed- 
mund Bishop. 

8 Epistles, bk. IX, Hp. xci. An abbot is the head of an abbey, the 
prior usually his second in command. In the case of a cathedral convent 
usually the bishop was titular abbot, the actual head being a prior in 
title, but an abbot in dignity. The Prior of Canterbury was mitred and 


sat in Parliament (p. 194). Usually a priory was a house of less dig- 
nity than an abbey. 


96 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


priated to religious houses were served by secular priests, 
and if monks became dignitaries of the Church their rela- 
tions with their old orders became nominal. 

But to all such generalizations there are frequently im- 
portant exceptions and, especially in countries converted by 
the monks, the monastic and secular organizations were apt 
to get partially interlaced. In England about half the 
cathedrals were also monastic churches and in Scotland and 
Ireland there were several similar instances. Monastic 
cathedrals on the Continent were more rare, but the noble 
Benedictine church at Monreale (Sicily) has been the cathe- 
dral of a diocese since 1174, and during 1371 the Abbot of 
Monte Cassino became bishop of a large diocese formed by 
the Pope by the federation of several others. The conven- 
tual church is the cathedral, but if the abbot is not in 
episcopal orders the duties have, of course, in part to be 
performed by a deputy. German monastic (Premonstraten- 
sian) cathedrals were Liibeck, Brandenburg, Havelburg and 
Ratzeburg. | 

On the whole, however, during the earlier Middle Ages 
the monk as such took little direct part in the actual routine 
work of the civilization that he did so much to mould. 
Rather he directed from outside. But this was not to be 
permanent. 

Feeling that monks were apt to have far greater earnest- 
ness than the secular clergy, Chrodegang, Archbishop of 
Metz, cousin and minister to Pepin, the first of the long line 
of ecclesiastical statesmen, tried to impose a rule upon all 
his clergy. He thus became to some degree a pioneer in the 
West of bringing the monk as such into the service of the 
Church. He succeeded permanently in separating canons 
who met in their chapter houses and were bound to chastity 
and obedience, but not to poverty,’* from the ordinary paro- 
chial clergy. 


4 That is, they might hold private property. 


MONK REBUILDERS OF A WORLD 97 


A semi-monastic body of clergy 1° was not yet, however, 
destined to appear. Canons themselves came to be either 
secular, serving a cathedral or collegiate church, or else 
monastic, belonging to definite orders such as the Augus- 
tinian, founded about 1080 by S. Ivo of Chartres, which 
followed the rule of S. Augustine (p. 62), or the Premon- 
stratensian, founded by S. Norbert in 1120, at a little place 
near Laon, called Premontré. 

In the case of these orders all the brethren must be clergy 
and they were sometimes expected to preach and, though 
rarely, to exercise cure of souls like ordinary parish priests. 
Even so, however, the religious were not very anxious to 
identify themselves with the work of the church itself; in 
England, out of two hundred and fifty-four Augustinian 
churches, only thirty-seven were parochial.’® Still, such 
orders did very definitely establish the principle that the 
whole duty of a religious is not to save his own soul. 

Medievalism, through its whole history, retained the stamp 
of its monastic origin, in its superb and lofty idealism. It 
devoted itself to a serious attempt, and the only one in his- 
tory that ever was made, to Christianize the order of the 
world. This, of course, is not to say that the period was 
morally better or perhaps even more religious than any 
other, but law, politics, and social institutions were defi- 
nitely based upon what the Middle Ages saw as distinctly 
Christian principles. In Geneva, New England, Scotland, 
and elsewhere there have been indeed in later days rather 
short-lived efforts to Christianize the order of a city, or a 
province, or a state, but, so far, hardly of the world itself. 

% Such as the Eudists, in much later times. 

16 Rev. J. Hodson, Arche@ological Jowrnal, (London) vols. xli-xlii. The 
canons served Carlisle Cathedral. The other English monastic cathedrals 
(Canterbury, Rochester, Winchester, Worcester, Ely, Norwich, Durham, | 
Bath, and Coventry, now destroyed), were all Benedictine. The Augus-) 
tinian order was introduced into England by Matilda, daughter of S. 


Margaret, and wife of Henry I. Gregor Mendel belonged to it in 
later times. 


98 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


During the medieval period, moral values were preferred 
to material, at least to a far greater degree than in the 
earlier days of Greece and Rome or the later ones of the 
Renaissance. An enormous proportion of communal energy 
and wealth was devoted to building those glorious cathe- 
drals, abbeys, and churches that to the majority of cultured 
travellers are the chief glory of Europe today. 

Even so, however, nothing but ignorance of medieval 
documents can excuse the impression that the average man 
of those days was better or happier than he is at present. 
Some of the grandest parts of the great Benedictine Cathe- 
dral at Durham were built by Flambard, who did so much 
to enhance the tyranny of John, the vilest minister indeed 
of England’s vilest king. 

It is a remarkable tribute to medizval monasticism that 
it seems never to have been conscious of the magnificent 
work it was doing for the world. Monastic literature 
nowhere, apparently, displays any pride in the secular 
activity of the monks, and there is much to show the sur- 
vival of the old Egyptian tradition. 

Cesarius of Heisterbach (b. 1180, probably in Koln), 
tells of a priest who entered his monastery and then pro- 
posed to leave it again to serve his parish in Alsace or to 
attend to the duties of his prebend at Kéln, but he was told 
most definitely that all such ideas came from the fiend. The 
cloister life was more pleasing to God than any good service 
to the world, and to return to the work even of an ideal 
secular priest would be to risk salvation itself.17 This is 
indeed the universal view. 

The European unity of the Middle Ages, which was in 
great part at least the work of monks, left no room for 
nations with their senseless animosities, that bane of recent 
years. Christendom was one. Churchmen might hold office 


" Cesarius, I, 215, quoted by Coulton, Five Centuries of Religion, I, 
352. 


MONK REBUILDERS OF A WORLD 99 


under any sky. In the thirteenth century one Albert was 
Archbishop, first of Armagh in Ireland and then of Livonia 
(p. 120). Chaucer’s monk had fought in Egypt, Prussia, 
Latvia, Russia, Armenia, and Spain, and always in the same 
Christian cause. The great medieval orders had their houses 
in all parts of Europe and as a rule knew no distinction of 
people or of race.*® 

The Pope was the universal priest, the Emperor the uni- 
versal monarch. No ecclesiastic could be independent of 
the former; no secular ruler might challenge in theory at 
any rate the world-supremacy of the latter. The ideal is 
majestically set forth in the famous painting on the east 
wall of the Spanish chapel of the Dominican church of 
S. Maria Novella at Florence, where Pope and Emperor sit 
on twin thrones supported by all the orders of the Church 
and of chivalry. Dante, in the magnificent language of his 
“De Monarchia,” sets forth the same great conception of 
the world-wide empire with its gift of universal peace. 

Doubtless the actual results came very far short of the 
ideal, but one comes across recognition of it in all sorts of 
medizval by-ways. S. Francis of Assisi, though of course 
an Italian, desired that he might see the Emperor in order 
to ask him entreatingly and persuasively to issue a decree 
against catching his sisters the larks. The whole conception 
of the Holy Roman Empire is set out on the (fifteenth cen- 
tury) roof of the cathedral in far-off Aberdeen. 

The Middle Ages had a proverb: “When anything is tom 
be done in the world a monk must be in'it, were it only asa’ ~ 
painted figure.” *° 

#% A sad exception to this was a statute passed by a Parliament at 
Kilkenny in 1310, prohibiting the Irish convents from taking neophites 
who were not of English blood. But this was later reversed. Cox, 
Hibernia Anglicana, 100, Stuart, Armagh, 115-116. 


2% Quoted by Luther: Dedicatory letter to Address to the German 
Nobility. 


100 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


BIBLIOGRAPHY: 


The main facts in the life of the greatest of all the Popes are 
given by Paulus Diaconus in his Vita Gregori. 

Far more is to be gathered from the fourteen books of the 
Epistles of 8S. Gregory, which are printed (in selection) in vols. 
XII and XIII, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, with his Pas- 
toral Rule. There is a good brief account of his life. Excellent 
English accounts of Gregory are given in Rev. H. K. Mann’s 
Lives of the Popes in the Early Middle Ages, vol. I, Pt. I; and 
Hodgkin’s Italy and her Invaders, bk. VI, chh. vii-x; and for 
Charles the Great, [b., bk. VIII, chh. xi-xiv; bk. IX. 

For the central ideal of the Middle Ages of course Bryce’s 
Holy Roman Empire is absolutely indispensable. 

In addition to books already cited Foakes Jackson’s Introduc- 
tion to the History of Christianity, a.p. 590-1314, and the chapter 
on The Monk a Civilizer, in Charles Kingsley’s The Roman and 
the Teuton. 


CHAPTER VI 
CELTIC MONASTICISM 


By monks, too, in a remote island of Europe was being 
preserved and developed a culture, magnificent, yet strangely 
unequal, that might have given the Irish race, supposing 
they had been endowed with organizing power, a world 
place comparable to that of Rome. 

Irish Christianity was even more monastic in character 
than that of the continent of Europe. Elsewhere the Church 
was organized by dioceses whose boundaries were fixed and 
whose areas had been moulded very largely by the political 
arrangements of Rome. But in Ireland we read far more of 
monasteries than of dioceses, and though the episcopal system 
was necessarily maintained, the abbot appears in many cases 
to be more important than the bishop, while the limits of 
dioceses and even their seats were constantly getting changed. 

There is excellent evidence that many, at any rate of the 
most characteristic features of ancient Irish monasticism — 
were derived from the East. The common interlacing pat- 
terns of the Celts were copied from characteristic Byzantine 
forms; the description of the church at Kildare in Cogitosus’ 
(ninth century) “Life of S. Bridget” with its numerous 
screens to separate the sexes, its eikonostasis, its painted pic- 
tures and jewelled ornaments pendant from the roof, exactly 
suggests a Coptie church of today.* 

The common practice of fasting on a debtor, not at all 


See my article on Some Irish Religious Houses in the Archeological 
Journal (London), vol. lxxii, pp. 89-134, June, 1915, pt. 286. 


101 


1022 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


infrequently mentioned in the Irish records (well known as 
far east as China), the belief in reincarnation, the numerous 
little chapels in place of large churches, the flabellum (or 
fly brush), in the “Book of Kells” portrait of S. Mat- 
thew, all show Oriental influence, while the Irish Easter, 
though peculiar to the Celtic Church, was almost cer- 
tainly derived originally from the East. But Irish Chris- 
tianity had very definite features of its own and was 
far from being a mere reproduction of the Eastern 
Church. 

An Irish monastery consisted as a rule of a number of 
huts where the recluses lived, with stone chapels where they 
prayed, defended by a rampart of earth or stones against 
the lawless world outside. Very many of the chapels can 
still be seen, though most of them are now roofless ruins. 
It is strange that during many centuries of early Christian 
history (perhaps from the fifth to the ninth), there was 
preserved in these remote spots the finest culture that the 
west of Europe knew. 

To some of these monastic retreats on mountain, bog, 
or shore came students from nearly the whole Christian 
world, and so well was the old learning maintained that 
during several centuries it was said that if in Western 
Europe any man knew Greek he must be Irish-born or 
Trish-taught. 

In most striking contrast to the stability to which S. Bene- 
dict attached so much importance was the undisciplined 
restlessness of the Irish monks. In the sixth century 
S. Brandan, a monk of Clonfert, sailed out into the ocean 
till he came to the fairest country that any man might see, 
which was a heavenly sight to behold, the trees burdened 
with ripe fruit, always day and never night, and neither too 
hot nor too cold. 

And in the centuries that followed we find the Irish monks 
wandering over all lands between Italy, and the Danube, 


CELTIC MONASTICISM 103 


and Iceland,? most diligently preaching the Gospel if there 
was anyone to convert, and yet appearing even more content 
to pray and meditate beside the tumbling seas, chanting 
their psalms to the accompaniment of the screech of sea- 
gulls and the eternal thud of the waves against the rocks. 
Many parts of Europe owe the planting or the revivification 
of their Christianity to the Celtic mystic-monks (p. 178). 

Dreamers they may have been and doubtless were, but it 
is remarkable that the first of them to gain a European 
reputation was likewise the first to turn the mind of the 
Christian Church to the serious discussion of one of the 
greatest questions of the world. The pagans regarded with 
a half-amused contempt the rather weary controversies con- 
cerning the human and divine natures in the Person of 
Christ that so perplexed and disturbed the mind of the 
Eastern Church. 

It was a Welsh or Irish monk, Pelagius, who broke new 
ground in denying that everything is preordained, boldly 
asserting that man may make himself just what he will. 
His conclusion that we may do without the grace of God— 
almost, not quite—was dangerous Christian speculation, and 
- it brought upon him the crushing wrath of S. Augustine 
himself; but at least the Celtic Church had raised a point 
of very vital interest not to Christians only, but to all man- 
kind. 

It was in line with the cheerful, happy, rather care-free 
type of mind that has ever marked the Celt, and enabled him 
to bear his own misfortunes and help others to bear theirs 
with a light-heartedness that all men do not know. Much the 
same character of good-fellowship and keen humour that 
marks the Irish race today may be traced in these ancient 
seers. 

The renowned John Scotus Erigena, one of the most 


?The ninth century Irish chronicler Dicuil in his De mensura orbis 
terre gives an account of many lands, including Iceland and Egypt. 


104 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


original thinkers of them all—whatever view be taken of 
some of his conclusions—was a friend of the Emperor, 
Charles the Bald. About the year 850, when at his court 
the monk had rather angered the prince, who bade him 
say what was the difference between a sot and a Scot: “‘Only 
this table,” was the reply ’—a pleasantry in substance 
repeated many times. 

The Irish chronicles, some in Latin but most in Erse, are 
very detailed and minute, but on the whole, it must be con- 
fessed, not very entertainingly written, and they almost 
entirely lack that human interest which is so delightful a 
feature of the Icelandic sagas. They reveal a terrible amount 
of lawlessness on the part of the very clergy themselves, and 
very clearly show the strangely unequal character of ancient 
Trish civilization, magnificent as to learning and art, but 
appalling as to public order. 

_ The very mission of S. Columba to Iona is said to have 

been occasioned by most lawless wars. He. had secretly 
copied a psalter that belonged to an abbot named Finnian, 
who taking the act as theft claimed that the copy was also 
his. Columba refused to give it up and appealed to the high 
king at Tara. } 

The sovereign decided that as to every cow belongs her 
calf, so the copy belonged to the owner of the original work. 
Instead of accepting this verdict, which certainly proceeds 
upon a rather questionable analogy, Columba raised the 
North and West against the high king, who was defeated 
and forced to fly to the earthworks of Tara. But rebuked 
by a synod, and stung by remorse, the Apostle of Scotland 
sailed out into the northern seas. | 

Eventually, out of sight of his beloved Ireland, he founded 

*The authority for this tale is De Vita et Preceptis Joannis Scoti 
Hrigenee, chap. iii. See Migne, P.L. 122, col. 17. Scotia was originally 
the name of Ireland. From her colony of Dalriada, in what is now 


Argyle, came the kings of Scotland, and the name was gradually trans- 
ferred about the eleventh century. 





CELTIC MONASTICISM 105 


a convent on the treeless island of Hi, which as Iona was 
soon to be known to all the earth. Thence sailing over 
stormy seas and wandering over heather moors and beside 
the Highland lochs, he penetrated far into Caledonia and 
sought to win to Christ heathen souls, as many as had per- 
ished in the war. 

This is the common story, but it is not mentioned by 
Bede * or Adamnan,* the former of whom merely says that 
he came into Britain after having founded in Ireland a 
noble monastery called the Field of Oaks; the latter, that 
“God helping, he drove out from Iona, which now has the 
the primacy, malignant and innumerable demons.” In the 
library of the (Royal) Irish Academy at Dublin is still 
preserved the copied psalter which for a thousand years was 
carried as a standard of battle by the Clan O’Donnell to 
which Columba belonged.® 

The MS. annals of MacFirbis record (a.p. 700) that “the 
clergy of Ireland went to their synods with weapons and 
fought pitched battles and slew many persons therein.” 

Mixed indeed it may have been, but the ancient culture 
of Ireland was one of the most splendid products of any age 
of the Church. So purely Christian was its character that 
for centuries the country was very widely known as the 
Island of the Saints. 

It was, perhaps, more than any other civilization, the 
product of monastic hands. By monks, largely at least, its 
chronicles were kept. By their hands probably in chief the 
manuscripts were illuminated and perhaps to some degree 
the ornaments of the Church were fashioned (p. 236). The 
famous schools were monastic. Wholly by monks was the 
great missionary work maintained—lIreland’s best gift to 
mankind, 


‘ H.H., bk. ITI, iv. 

5 Life of Columba, bk. I, ch. i. 

*The story is given at great length by Montalembert, Monks of the 
West, bk. IX, ch. i. 


106 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


No better monument of the ancient glories of monastic 
Ireland could possibly be asked than: “the city of Ciaran of 
Clonmacnoise, a dewy-bright, red-rose town, of its royal seed, 
of lasting fame, the hosts in the pure-streamed peaceful 
town.” * On desolate peat bogs beside the smooth-flowing 
Shannon stand about a dozen ancient chapels, all ruined 
except one, in a large churchyard, treeless except for a few 
old gnarled and almost leafless ashes. ‘Two round towers 
and many sculptured crosses, the rude architecture of some 
of the chapels with beautiful carved details in a few of them, 
and numerous monuments of almost every age, make the 
place profoundly interesting to all who love the work of 
other days; and yet the very lonely desolation of the spot 
perhaps constitutes its greatest charm.® 

Here was the one convent of Ireland that was common 
to all the septs, where each clan had a chapel of its own, 
peculiarly and universally esteemed, its property so vast 
that half Ireland was said to be within its bounds, and deemed 
so holy that all interred within its sacred soil were assured 
of entrance into heaven. 

Founded in the early sixth century by Ciaran, it remained 
the most famous of all Irish monasteries throughout the 
period of independence; later in the Middle Ages it passed 
to the Augustinian order (p. 97), yet so great was the re- 
spect for the days gone by that instead of building a clois- 
tered abbey in the usual style, the ancient Celtic chapels 
were zealously preserved. But yet in spite of all, no convent 
was more often burned by lawless Irish bands. 

In most extraordinary contrast with the rudeness of the 
buildings belonging to these ancient monastic retreats was 
the beauty and value of the things that they contained. 

‘Quoted from an ancient Irish poem, by Douglas Hyde, A Literary 
History of Ireland, p. 205. 

®See my article Irish Cathedral Churches, in the Archeological Jour- 


nal (London), vol. Ixxii, No. 288; 2nd ser., vol. xxii, No. 4, pp. 350-352. 
One of the churches of Clonmacnoise was the cathedral of a diocese. 


CELTIC MONASTICISM 107 


“The Book of Kells,” perhaps the most beautiful illumi- 
nated manuscript on earth, drawn and painted by devoted 
monkish hands about the seventh century, though now the 
chief treasure of the library of Trinity College, Dublin, was 
probably kept for the first few centuries of its existence in 
huts no better than those of the South African Kafirs today. 
At Clonmacnoise itself in 1129 “the Four Masters” record 
how, ‘‘The altar of the great Church of Cluain-mic-nois was 
robbed, and jewels were carried off from thence, namely the 
carracan (model) of Solomon’s temple, which had been pre- 
sented by Maelseachlainn, son of Domhnall; * * * and the 
three jewels which Toirdhealbhach Ua Conchobhair had 
presented, 2.e., a silver drinking cup of Ua Riada, king of 
Aradh; a silver chalice with a burnishing of gold upon it, 
with an engraving by the daughter of Ruaidhri Ua Conchob- 
hair; and the silver cup of Ceallach, successor of Patrick.” 
Incidentally this list is interesting as showing that the 
ancient Irish works of art were sometimes made by women. 

The genesis of each new movement in monasticism was 
nearly always marked by the codperation of women, sisters 
or close associates of the men. In the cases of SS. Pacho- 
mius, Basil, Augustine, Benedict, and Francis of Assisi, the 
houses for monks and nuns were far apart, separated by a 
river or by miles of countryside. 

But Celtic monasticism was not averse to double houses 
and sometimes a lady ruled the whole foundation as in the 
ease of S. Bridget of Kildare (p. 101), one of Iveland’s three 
great patron saints.® 

But for their exceedingly limited power of administra- 
tion, the Irish might have evolved a third type of Chris- 
tianity as different from that of the Latin Church as it is 
from the Greek. But this was not to come. Irish govern- 


° The others being SS. Patrick and Columba. The three are frequently 
represented together as.on the east gable of the cathedral at Down- 
patrick, 


108 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


ment, both of Church and State, was largely in chaos when 
the English conquest in the twelfth century confounded con- 
fusion, but did not for a long time, and never completely, 
succeed in assimilating Irish Christianity to the general 
orthodoxy of Western Europe. 

Vainly in 1220 did an English bishop put out the sacred 
fire of S. Bridget of Kildare. The Irish got it relighted as 
soon as they possibly could and preserved something of the 
strange atmosphere of one of the most unique monasteries 
of Europe, a community of Christian vestal virgins that had 
been founded by 8S. Bridget in the early part of the sixth 
century.’? 

In the ancient history of the Irish Church we meet with 
nothing that can be called an order. Each monastery went 
its own way; each great abbot was practically a law to him- 
self. Such organization as there was, developed along tribal 
lines. The level of asceticism frequently maintained was 
exceedingly high. There was all the traditional monastic 
sympathy with birds and beasts. 

In Ireland itself the lovely traditions of the ancient Celtic 
Church are fragrant to this day, yet despite their splendid 
missionary work, the early monks had little of their very 
own to give the world. Workman points out that the system 
of penitentials is one of the chief survivals from the earliest 
days.'? 

First in their mission convents, then in their own island, 
the rather confused traditions of the Celts gave way to the 
organizing genius of Rome, the customs of Columba and 
Columbanus yielded to the Benedictine Rule. 


BIBLIOGRAPHY: 
The ancient chronicles of Ireland were digested into a single 
record in 1632-36 by Franciscan friars; their work is generally 


* The Four Masters gives the date of her death as 525. 
“ Hvolution of the Monastic Ideal, p. 212 seq. 





CELTIC MONASTICISM 109 


known from the chief compilers as The Four Masters, but it is 
often cited by the name of Colgan, another Franciscan of Lou- 
vain. Some of the works they used, such as the Annals of 
Clanmacnoise have perished, so that The Four Masters has some 
value as an original source. A very convenient edition is that 
by John O’Donovan, Dublin, 1851. This has parallel columns in 
Erse and English. Another compilation of the old Chronicles is 
the History of Ireland by Geoffrey Keating, tr. by J. O’Mahony, 
New York, 1866. Adamnan’s Life of Columba is conveniently 
accessible in Huyshe’s English edition. 

Douglas Hyde’s Literary History of Ireland is a monument of 
patient research. 

For details of the different Irish monasteries, Archdall’s Mo- 
nasticon Hibernicum, 1786, is invaluable. 

Among other secondary authorities are Montalembert’s Monks 
of the West; Prof. George T. Stokes, Ireland and the Celtic 
Church; Prof. Bury’s Life of St. Patrick, and a particularly good 
chapter (iv) in Workman’s Evolution of the Monastic Ideal. 


CHAPTER VII 
NUNS, HERMITS, AND PILGRIMS 


Nuns: It may surely be claimed for monasticism that it 
has done something for the position of women. If indeed 
it be true that they have not played a part in asceticism at 
all cor parable to that of men, at least women have been as 
prominent in the cloister as their sisters ever were in the 
world. Along some lines, indeed, far more. 

One of the most remarkable women of all time was un- 
doubtedly S. Hilda, the renowned Abbess of Streanshalch, 
which the Danes called Whitby, whose double monastery for 
men and women preserved a very ancient tradition of the 
Celtic Church. By the Irish missionaries it was introduced 
into Saxondom, and there it took deep root. 

It was during her time in this abbey that there was held 
(in 664) the most momentous council that ever came together 
on English soil. The convention was purely monastic; it 
gathered in an abbey, or perhaps beside it on the grassy 
slopes that stand high above the North Sea. Monks were 
the chief debaters: S. Wilfrid, who pointed out the absurdity 
of a gdittle community on a fringe of the earth defying the 
customs of the universal world; and S. Colman, who spoke 
with pardonable enthusiasm of the great tradition of Co- 
lumba, and the still greater one of the Apostle, S. John, 
whose Easter he claimed to keep. 

Two civilizations stood opposed, the Latin South and the 
Celtic North. Intruding Saxondom was asked to make its 
choice. Should it share with Europe the greatest metropolis 
of the earth, now in the realm of religion regaining what it 

110 


NUNS, HERMITS, AND PILGRIMS 111 


had once held and lost in the realm of politics; or should it 
honour as the centre of its faith a remote rock island with 
neither wealth, population, nor power? The nominal ques- 
tion concerned the proper date for Easter, but eventually a 
decision was reached on rather strangely material grounds. 
To 8. Peter, all admitted, Christ had delivered the keys of 
the portals of heaven. Could he reasonably be expected to 
open to any that minimized the authority of his own Ch arch ? 
To Columba no one could claim that Christ had given any 
such powers. So the king, Oswy, decided in favour of Wil- 
frid and of Rome. 

The importance of this decision could not easily be exag- 
gerated. Had it been in favour of Iona instead of Rome a 
union of Celtic and Saxon Christianity might have had time 
to consolidate in the British Isles a culture so different from 
that of the Continent that the whole story of England had 
been changed. 

In a monastery whose Superior was a woman as famous 
as any of her contemporaries, the fate of Britain was decided 
for centuries to come. And yet it is possible enough that a 
decision in favour of so ill-administered a Church as that 
of the Celts would have had to be revised. Wilfrid is in 
many ways a far less lovable character than his rivals, several 
of them saints, but he represented a broader view. 

The names of women are very prominent in the annals of 
Celtic and Saxon monasticism. All admired maidens who 
set their virginity above everything else. Besides SS. Bridget 
and Hilda, 8. Ebba of Coldingham ? and S. Etheldreda of 
Ely were as well known as any in the ascetic story of their 
day. Eventually the feudalization of monasticism inevitably 
tended to reduce the prestige of women rulers, who become 

1The council is described by Bede, H.H., bk. III, ch. 25; and Eddius, 
Life of Wilfrid. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, An. 664, merely says that 
Colman with his companions went to his own country. Montalembert, 


Monks of the West, bk. XII, ch. i, gives a detailed account. 
*¥For both see Bede, H.H., bk. IV, ch. xix. 


112 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


far less prominent after the tenth century. During the later 
Middle Ages no one of the first religious houses of Europe 
was a nunnery. The great Benedictine abbey of Whitby 
rose on the site of S. Hilda’s convent, but it still bore her 
name; today the majestic ruins of its thirteenth century 
church stand high above the cliffs of jade, seen far over the 
North Sea. At Ely and Coldingham as well monks kept the 
Benedictine Rule where nuns had lived before. | 

Still some great houses of women survived, notably in the 
West country, Romsey and Shaftesbury, both with royal 
associations. ‘The latter was so rich that it was popularly 
said in the Middle Ages that if the Abbot of Glastonbury 
could marry the Abbess of Shaftesbury their son would be 
richer than the king.* 

It is perhaps in the realm of literature that cloistered 
women have contributed most to the world. There is not a 
great deal to record of the writings of lay women between 
Sappho and Madame de Staél, or at least Madame de 
Sévigné. But during the Middle Ages there lived in dif- 
ferent cloisters of Northern Europe a succession of mystics 
who do something to fill the gap. 

In the tenth century, Hrotsvith was writing her well- 
formed metrical legends, her vigorous religious plays, and 
rhyming chronicles, based largely on the Latin authors whose 
works were in the library of her Saxon convent at Gander- 
sheim. 

In the twelfth century the more famous Hildegard,* of 
Bingen on the Rhine, a double monastery for monks and 
nuns, was writing her visions and prophecies, some of which 
the great S. Bernard (p. 141) declared to be divinely in- 
spired, while Pope Eugenius III wrote to express his wonder 

* Dugdale, Monasticon, vol. i, p. 472. The remark is still very common 
in both towns, but probably the tradition has not been continuous. Dug- 
dale very possibly preserved it. See also Fuller, Church History of 


Britain, III, p. 332. 
“She died 1178; for her writings see Migne, P.L. 197. 


NUNS, HERMITS, AND PILGRIMS 113 


and delight; and the Emperor Barbarossa once asked her 
advice. Her contemporary, 8S. Elizabeth of Schénau, had 
revelations about the famous virgins of Koln and S. Ursula. 
It is remarkable that her passion for celibacy made her feel 
doubts as to the complete depravity of heretics who were 
supposed to be opposed to marriage, the Cathari. 

In the thirteenth century the literary nuns of Helfta in 
Saxony were giving their house wide fame for its Christian 
mysticism. The well-known revelations of Sister Gertrude 
(d. 1311) have a clear, sweet note of true monastic devotion 
and deep love of Our Lord, but before the time of 8. Thomas 
a Kempis (p. 213) no other writer, monk or nun, seems to 
have come quite to the level of real inspiration that character 
izes the Lady Julian of Norwich. 

The revelations of this fourteenth-century mystic make a 
real appeal. They stand out distinct and clear. They leave 
a strong impression which many of such writings do not. As 
she describes the heaven that she saw from her lonely cell, 
she gives us a real picture that all would like to remember 
in death: “And in this Shewing mine understanding was 
lifted up into heaven where I saw our Lord as a lord in His 
own house, which hath called all His dearworthy servants 
and friends to a stately feast. Then I saw the Lord take no 
place in His own house, but I saw Him royally reign in His 
house, fulfilling it with joy and mirth, Himself endlessly to 
gladden and to solace His dearworthy friends, full homely 
and full courteously, with marvellous melody of endless love, 
in His own fair blessed Countenance.” ° 

And there is something extraordinarily beautiful in her 
description of the blessed Virgin: “I saw her ghostly, in 
bodily likeness: a simple maid and a meek, young of age and 
little waxen above a child, in the stature that she was when 
she conceived. Also God showed in part the wisdom and 
the truth of her soul: wherein I understood the reverent 

5 Revelation, vi. 


114 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


beholding in which she beheld her God and Maker, marvel- 
ling with great reverence that He would be born of her that 
was a simple creature of His making.” 

But while the mystic writings of medizval nuns are apt 
to compare quite favourably with such rather ordinary reve- 
lations as those, for example, of the Monk of Evesham 
(really Eynsham), it is evident that they were rather in- 
clined to prefer to receive their rules from men. The Cis- 
tercian chronicler, Ailred of Rievaulx (the biographer of 
King David I of Scotland) in the twelfth century wrote a 
rule which advises nuns to live by the work of their hands, 
not to own flocks, nor to engage in secular business, nor to 
turn their cells into schools. 

The better known “ancren riwle” of the following century 
distinguishes between professed nuns and ladies who merely 
lived together without taking any vows. “The true re- 
cluses,” it says, “are indeed birds of heaven, that fly aloft 
and sit on the green boughs singing merrily; that is, they 
meditate, enraptured, upon the blessedness of heaven that 
never fadeth but is ever green, singing right merrily.” 

Keeping school is fraught with danger from the personal 
affection it is apt to bring. So it will be better to let servants 
do any teaching that must be done. No other animal than 
a cat should be kept, unless the community has need of a 
cow. Apparently dogs were deemed unsuitable to religious 
as entailing a good deal of attention, which seems indeed to 
have been the case with the one owned by Chaucer’s nun. 
At Carrow Priory, Norwich, the monastery cat once con- 
trived to make considerable trouble by killing a pet sparrow 
belonging to a nun, an incident immortalized by one of 
Skelton’s best-known poems,® which to a slight extent helps 
us to picture the atmosphere of a sisterhood at the end of 
the Middle Ages. The evil custom of using convents for the 


* Boke of Phyllyp Sparowe slain by Gib, owr cat savage, among the 
Nones Blake, by John Skelton (d. 1529). Ed. A. Dyce. 


NUNS, HERMITS, AND PILGRIMS 11485 


support of girls belonging to leading families for whom no 
husbands could be found had long tended to multiply the 
number of nuns with no real vocation to religion. 

That the old double monastery rather appealed to the 
British mind seems to be indicated by the way it reappears 
in the only distinctively English order of the Middle Ages. 
S. Gilbert of Sempringham in Lincolnshire (c. 1083-1189), 
after studying all monastic rules with the object of taking its 
best features from each, decided in favour of houses for both 
nuns and monks. The head of the whole establishment was 
a prior with direct charge of the canons, and the women were 
under the control of three colleague prioresses, who took it 
in turn to preside in chapter. 

The nuns did the cooking and sewing, besides being in 
charge of the library, but hatches were arranged so that men 
and women should see as little as possible of each other. 
Excavations at Watton Abbey* have shown that a wall 
divided the church so that both nuns and canons when in 
choir could see the altar and take part in the same singing 
but could not see each other. 

The Premonstratensian order (p. 97) was originally 
double, but this was abolished as early as 1137, though some 
few nunneries remained.*' Another double order was that 
of Fontevraud,®? which had a house at Amesbury in England. 

There were very obvious dangers in these houses and the 
system never spread very far. As early as 1200, we find 
Abbot Hugh of Cluny (p. 123) issuing an order that no 
woman might be received into any monastery of the order 
except ad succurrendum; that is, when there is immediate 
danger of death.’° 


™In Yorkshire, founded about 1150 by Eustace Fitz John on an old 
nunnery site. 

®See Helyot, Histoire des ordres monastiques, 1714, ii, p. 175. 

°This abbey was founded by Robert of Arbrissel (d. 1117), who made 
a lady, Husende of Champagne, its Superior. 

”D. Royce, Landbok of Winchcombe, I, 210. Coulton, Five Centuries 
of Religion, I, 480. 


116 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


It is remarkable, however, that as late as the fourteenth 
century a woman felt that the cause of religion could best 
be served by the foundation of a new order and by a revival 
of double monasteries. One of the most interesting monu- 
ments in the cathedral at Upsala, Sweden, commemorates a 
man known to his own generation as the president of a com- 
mission that codified the laws of Upland in 1296, but to us 
as the father of S. Brigitta, or Briget (1304-73). Though 
she had been married and was the mother of seven children, 
she developed in later hfe a great admiration for monasticism. 

She received a number of revelations which are not very 
interesting in themselves, but they were so pointed in their 
allusions that she had to travel abroad. She made the pil- 
_grimage to Jerusalem and spent some time in Italy, attempt- 
ing to get the Popes back from Avignon to Rome, in which 
latter city she died. 

Her order centred at Wadstena, in her native land. Ata 
time when monastic culture was beginning to decay (p. 241) 
it tried to collect books and to promote education and in fact 
is chiefly remarkable as the last great effort that was made in 
the Middle Ages—and it was after the rise of the friars— 
to revive without any serious modification the older monastic 
ideals, 

The only house of the Brigittine order in England was 
Zion on the Thames, and it came into being through the mar- 
riage of a daughter of Henry IV to Eric XIII of Sweden 
(1406). The chapel had a double choir, separated only by 
an iron screen, so that the monks and nuns could see each 
other as they chanted their offices. 

At the dissolution some of them retired to the Continent 
and have continued their corporate existence—the only Eng- 
lish convent that escaped complete dissolution. 

Hermits: Despite the decision of 8. Benedict of Aniane 


11 There are copious extracts’ in Bp. Wordsworth’s Hale Lectures, 1910, 
The National Church of Sweden, pp. 129-132. 


NUNS, HERMITS, AND PILGRIMS 117 


to seek a revival of the Rule of S. Benedict the Great 
(p. 98), there were important medizval developments in 
the direction of a completer return to the genesis of monasti- 
cism as practised by the solitaries of the desert. Purely 
from the point of view of the story of asceticism these are 
possibly of even more significance than the rise of the orders 
of Cluny and Citeaux, but as we are principally concerned 
with the place of monasticism in the history of the world 
their importance is very much less. 

In the eleventh century the Camaldulensian order was ° 
founded (c. 1020), by Romuald of Ravenna who, after sow- 
ing his wild oats, became exceedingly austere and helped to 
bring about in Italy a remarkable monastic revival which 
sought to restore much of the manner of life of the Egyptian 
monks. 

General religious life was at a low ebb; the great Em- 
peror, Otto III, the last who ever reigned at Rome, was 
trying to reform the Papacy by the inauguration of a 
German, Bruno (Gregory V) and he greatly welcomed 
Romuald’s reform, reverently kissing his cowl. Though an 
eremitical or hermit order, the Camaldulensians followed the 
Benedictines in their splendid missionary work. Vallom- 
brosa, among the Apennines, founded in 1038 by Gualbert, 
became the centre of another such order. 

That of Grandmont (1073) was almost purely French and 
that its bons hommes might be free for their contemplation, 
all business affairs were entrusted to lay brothers. Its Rule, 
based on the Camaldulensian, was committed to writing in 
1124 after the death of its founder, Stephen, a nobleman of 
Auvergne. 

A German, Bruno of Koln, was the founder of the best 
known of the eremitical orders. It dates from about 1086 
and takes its name from the mother house in the deserts of 
Chartreuse, near Grenoble, in what was Burgundy of old. 
Alone of all great orders, though it never was very large, the 


118 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


Carthusians boast that they have never needed to be re- 
formed, for through all the centuries till today they have 
kept something like the austerity with which they began. 

Their severe asceticism made a profound impression on 
the Benedictines of that day. Guibert, Abbot of Nogent, 
wrote of them: “They hardly ever speak, and if they want 
anything they make signs. If they drink wine it is watered 
so as to be scarcely stronger than water. They wear a hair 
shirt next the skin, while their other garments are scanty 
and thin.” +* Peter the Venerable (p. 184) says of them: 
“To mortify the flesh they wear hair shirts; their fasting 
is almost continuous; * * * they never eat meat; cheese 
and eggs only Sundays and Thursdays. * * * They live in 
separate little houses like the monks of Egypt and occupy 
their time in silence in reading, prayer, and working with 
their hands, particularly writing books. They say most of 
the offices in their cells, but come together in their church 
for vespers and matins.” ** 

Just under the Hambleton Hills of Yorkshire still stand 
the singularly complete ruins of a house of this order, which 
was built in the fifteenth century; Mount Grace is absolutely 
destitute of that monastic magnificence so characteristic of 
Cistercian abbeys not far off. The severely simple cells sur- 
round two large courts, each with a hatch through the wall 
by which food could be passed to its occupant. 

Between the courts is a church, small and extremely plain 
(p. 285); but that in one respect at least there was an im- 
provement on the habits of the Egyptian monks is proved by 
the presence of the usual monastic lavatory at the entrance 
to the refectory, a building not very frequently used, for 
only on particular festivals were there any common meals. 

Directly, perhaps, this order has played but little part in 
the story of the world, but it was a work by a Carthusian 


4 Migne, P.L., 161, col. 853. 
*Ib., 189, col. 943-5. De miraculis, II, 28. 


NUNS, HERMITS, AND PILGRIMS 119 


monk which at a very critical time turned the thoughts of 
Ignatius Loyola to religion and changed the whole current 
of his life. 

Piterims: Visiting places consecrated by the faith was a 
very common occupation of our medieval fathers. Not again 
till the building of railroads did men tour Europe so much. 
Not infrequently there was exactly that mingling of religion 
and pleasure, of pilgrimage and picnic, that may yet be seen 
in the ancient shrines of Japan. Despite the utmost differ- 
ence of every detail, much of the atmosphere of Chaucer’s 
pilgrimage to Canterbury may be felt in Nikko or Kyoto 
today. 

Veneration for the last resting-places of saints and pil- 
grimage to their tombs seems to be nearly as old as Chris- 
tianity. It was probably the origin of the dedication of 
churches to saints. Reginald Pecock thus defends the prac- 
tice: ‘And ferther, sithen it is not resonable and conuenient 
that such bodies or bonis or relikis be left withoute in the 
baar feeld (and that bothe for it were azens the eese of the 
peple which schulde come therto in reyny and wyndi wedris, 
and for that thei myzten thanne be take awey be wickid men 
not dredind God) therfore it is ful resonable and worthi 
for to bilde ouer tho bodies and bonis and other relikis 
chapellis or chirchis.” 14 

The custom of pilgrimage antedates the rise of monasti-° 
cism, but both in East and West most chief shrines came into 
- the Reason of monks. In Britain those of S. Patrick at 
Down, 8. Columba at Iona, S. Thomas at Canterbury, S. 
Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, enshrined at Durham, Our Lady 
of Walsingham, 8. Edmund, 8. Alban, S. Swithun at Win- 
chester, the Confessor at Westminster, and Edward II at 
Gloucester, with many more, were all in the churches of 


* Repressor of overmuch blaming of the clergy, II, 8. The work did 
much to get the writer into trouble; it is strongly anti-Lollard and yet 
not according to the orthodox standards of the day. The work belongs 
to the middle of the fifteenth century and is printed in the Rolls Series. 


120 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


monks, but others of importance such as S. David and S. > 
Richard of Chichester were in the churches of secular canons. 

Monks guard most of the holy places of the East, but in 
Western Europe on the mainland many great shrines have 
always been in secular hands, such as the Three Kings, at 
Milan, carried off by Barbarossa to Koln, 8. Olaf, at Trondh- 
jem, Charles the Great, at Aachen. 

In the treasury of the cathedral at Sens is a most inter- 
esting collection of thirteenth-century documents relating to 
the miracles and canonization of S. Edmund Rich, Con- 
fessor, and Archbishop of Canterbury, 1234-40. He died at 
Soisy and was buried in the abbey at Pontigny, canonized 
1248, 

In 1240, Guy de Villenauxe, Abbot, notifies the faithful 
at Canterbury that miracles are being wrought at the tomb. 
In 1244, after communications from the university of Ox- 
ford, the convent of Merton, and Robert, Bishop of Salisbury, 
an inquiry was held at Pontigny by Albert, Archbishop of 
Armagh, and Lucas, Dean of Paris. Next year the former 
issued an indulgence to all visitors to the tomb. In 1245, 
(S.) Richard, Bishop of Chichester, the Prior of Esseby, 
and Robert Bacon, a Dominican friar, report on the miracles 
and next year the Bishops of Lincoln and London publish 
another report favourable to the miracles. 

We then get indulgences or other endorsements of the 
miracles from the Archbishop of Canterbury and several 
other English prelates, from Scottish, German, and French 
bishops, besides those of Lacedemonia, Antarade, and of 
Sora, while Henry III of England in 1251 presented four 
candles. Finally on April 20, 1255, Pope Alexander IV 
issues an indulgence of seven years for all who visit the 
shrine and offer alms. 

Probably the documents that survive are only part of the 
original collection. The whole suggests that the monastic or 
other guardians of the tomb of a saint, or other prominent 





NUNS, HERMITS, AND PILGRIMS 121 


Christian, sometimes sent travellers to interview bishops and 
others whose endorsement was expected to carry weight in 
every part of Christendom to get indulgences for their pil- 
grims. These might be expected to enhance the popularity 
of the new shrine by demonstrating to patrons from every 
land that the place was accepted as worthy of veneration by 
the bishops of their own home towns. 

That sometimes a business element entered into such mat- 
ters is evident from the fact that when the rather worthless 
king of England, Edward II, was put to death in Berkeley 
eastle, one church after another refused sepulture. Thokey, 
Abbot of Gloucester, however, realizing that a reaction would 
inevitably come and that the stock of the murdered sovereign 
was sure to rise as time softened existing animosities, gave a 
tomb in the choir of his church. 

His prescience was abundantly justified. After a few 
years the tomb became a shrine, and from the offerings of 
the pilgrims most of the church was splendidly transformed 
as we see it today in all the magnificence of the twilight of 
the Gothie style. 

The pilgrimage to Canterbury inspired in Chaucer one of 
the finest of all English poems. It is remarkable that in 
later days its lingering memories suggested the “Pilgrim’s 
Progress.” Staying in the neighbourhood of Guildford beside 
the North Downs, on the road from the west country to Can- 
terbury, when the memories of old days were still fresh, 
Bunyan must have spoken to men whose grandfathers had 
made the pilgrimage. And as he wandered over the grass- 
grown way and explored the downs and the swamps, the 
rivers and the fields, as he visited Shelford Fair and looked 
up to the Surrey Hills, the idea of his great masterpiece 
must gradually have taken shape in his mind. 

It was medisvalism that inspired the noblest of all the 
writings of early Puritanism, which in its general atmos- 
phere still preserves much of the old monastic point of view. 


122 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


It is the spirit of the Middle Ages that pervades the work, 
but in its pure simple language and its tremendous sincerity, 
in the marvellous and unstudied success of its allegory, it can 
rank with the very finest outpourings of the soul of Chris- 
tianity in any age. 

By the other great Puritan writer of that same period, 
the middle of the seventeenth century, was described the 
charm and beauty of monastic life in poetry that has cer- 
tainly been excelled by no one. The whole spirit of the 
medizval mystic in his cloister lives again, as for many of us 
nowhere else, in Milton’s “Il Penseroso.” 


BIBLIOGRAPHY: 


Bede’s Ecclesiastical History and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 
are very conveniently accessible in the well-known translation by 
Dr. J. A. Giles. For the centenarian of the monks, S. Gilbert, 
see Dictionary of National Biography (which for British ascetics 
is generally better than any encyclopedia); also Dugdale, Mo- 
nasticon Anglicanum, VI, 2, pp. Il-xcix. Also Graham: St. Gil- 
bert of Sempringham and the Gilbertines. 

Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love shewed to a Devout Servant 
of our Lord, called Mother Juliana, an Anchorete of Norwich, ed. 
Cressy, 1670. Last edition, Fr. Tyrrell, 1902. 

Lina Eckenstein’s Woman under Monasticism (Cambridge, 
1896) is admirable, with copious references to the sources. 

Eileen Power’s Medieval English Nunneries, c. 1275-1555 is an 
excellent piece of work. 

Works on medieval pilgrimage are: Camm, Forgotten Shrines. 
vege et tr. Smith; English Wayfaring Life in the Middle 

ges. 


: 
, 





CHAPTER VIII 
THE GREAT HOUSE OF CLUNY 


Of all the great abbeys of medieval days, there was none 
quite so powerful as that of Cluny, which became eventually 
the mother house of an order that counted several hundred 
priories stretching from Palestine to Scotland, all under the 
immediate control of the Abbot of Cluny himself. He en- 
joyed a preéminence overshadowed only by that of the Pope. 
Within his own domain, he coined money and exercised 
almost regal power. 

The house was founded by William, Duke of Aquitaine, ~ 
and the original charter, dated September 11, 910, is exceed- 
ingly interesting as illustrating the general point of view of 
the pious founders of medieval times; in its main provisions 
it is exactly like a thousand more. K 

“To all right thinkers it is clear that the providence of , 
God has so provided for certain rich men that, by means of | 
their transitory possessions, if they use them wall: they may 
be able to merit everlasting rewards. As to eich thing, 
indeed, the divine word, showing it to be possible and altos 
gether advising it, says: ‘The riches of a man are the redemp- 
tion of his soul,’ + I, William, count and duke by the grace 
of God, diligently pondering this, and desiring to provide 
for my own safety while I am still able, have considered it 
advisable—nay, most necessary—that from the temporal 
goods which have been conferred upon me I should give some 
little portion for the gain of my soul. 


1 Proverbs, xiii, 8. 
123 


124 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


“T do this, indeed, in order that I who have thus increased 
in wealth may not, perchance, at the last be accused of having 
spent all in caring for my body, but rather may rejoice, when 
fate at last shall snatch all things away, in having reserved 
something for myself. * * * I hand over from my own 
rule to the holy apostles, Peter namely and Paul, the pos- 
sessions over which I hold sway, the town of Cluny namely, 
with the demesne manor and the church in honour of St. 
Mary the mother of God and of St. Peter the prince of the 
apostles, together with all the things pertaining to it, the 
vills, indeed, the chapels, the serfs of both sexes, the vines, 
the fields, the meadows, the woods, the waters and their out- 
lets, the mills, the incomes and revenues, what is cultivated 
and what is not, all in their entirety. * * * 

“T adjure you, oh holy apostles and glorious princes of 
the world, Peter and Paul, and thee, oh supreme pontiff of 
the apostolic see, that, through the canonical and apostolic 
authority which ye have received from God, ye do remove 
from participation in the holy church and in eternal life, 
the robbers and invaders and alienators of these possessions, 
which I do give to you with joyful heart and ready will.” 

The Rule of S. Benedict is prescribed and the charter con- 
templates nothing like the foundation of a new order. The 
Duke asked advice from his friend Berno, of whose well- 
ordered little monastery at Baume he had heard excellent 
things. To the ducal horror the Abbot declared that the only 
really suitable site for the new house was his favourite hunt- 
ing place at Cluny and further, perhaps not entirely without — 
a grim sense of humour, he selected the dog-kennel as occu- 
pying the exact spot where the church should rise. The Duke 
was shocked, as any good sportsman might be. He protested, 
but it was quite in vain. 

Bidden to reflect what reward God would give him for dogs 
and what for monks, he let Berno have his own way, and 
where the hunting dogs had bayed there rose the great church 








THE GREAT HOUSE OF CLUNY 125 


that in size? and magnificence surpassed all other buildings 
of medieval date. 

The abbey was endowed with wide local autonomy and 
freed from secular control by any earthly power. The 
charter provides that no count nor other worldly ruler, no 
bishop, nor even the Pope may invade its property. Thus 
from the first, Cluny was the seat of a prince abbot, who was 
rapidly to take his place among the highest prelates of 
Christendom. 

It is remarkable that there was no intrinsic reason why 
Cluny should soar to so high an eminence; no great saint 
was there enshrined, it represented no important city or state, 
its founder was a feudal prince not more illustrious than 
many of his fellows. 

But the abbey may be said from the very first to have stood 
preéminently for a monastic imperialism that was presently 
to influence the whole Church. It sought to reincarnate the 
Roman spirit of discipline and that on the vastest scale. 
-§. Benedict in his Rule had taken the Roman conception of 
the patria potestas; the abbot was the father in a monastic 
_ family, who claimed no high position in the Church, and in 
the State still less. 

Cluny rapidly evolved an abbot who stood in the place of 
a sovereign and exercised imperial sway over every house 
of the vast organization. The medizval orders, and Cluny in 
particular, might have tended to decentralize the Church by 
giving to monastic Christianity other capitals than Rome, 
but any such tendency was completely neutralized by the 
closest union of the ascetic forces with the Papacy. 

In authority the Abbot of Cluny was second but to the 


2 Prof. Edward Prior points out (History of Gothic Art in England, 
p. 34) that no less than four English churches were larger than the 
original church at Cluny,—London, Winchester, S. Edmundsbury, and S. 
Albans—all but the first monastic. But the addition of the huge nar- 
thex at Cluny, finished in 1220, made the Burgundian church larger 


than any of its English rivals. 


126 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


sovereign Pontiff, the only other ecclesiastic (except perhaps 
the grand masters of the military orders [chap. xv]) whose 
authority was Europe-wide; more powerful than any metro- 
politan, yet in orders merely a priest. The heads of all the 
daughter priories met together in the General Chapter, but 
this was purely advisory and all real authority in the im- 
mense organization belonged to the Abbot of Cluny, who thus 
towered over all other figures in the monastic world almost 
as did the Pope in the universal Church. Far too much 
depended on his own personality for permanently effective 
rule. 

Berno died before any great building progress was made. 
The real moulder of the destinies of Cluny was Odo, the 
second abbot. His life was written by an enthusiastic dis- 
ciple, another monk named John.? Odo had a very peculiar 
veneration for S. Martin (p. 57) to whom his father had 
dedicated him when a child. 

He was horrified, however, by the monks of Tours who 
were so entirely oblivious of the traditions of their great 
Father that they would not even wear monastic garb; they 
went about in flowing robes of many colours and wore shoes 
that shone like glass.* Evidently the ravages of the North- 
men and the general confusion they brought about were ruin- 
ing monastic life. 

Eventually at Baume he had found congenial cloister life 
and because of his learning he was appointed schoolmaster. 
When nearly fifty years of age he became the Abbot of Cluny 
and energetically entered upon the task of building the struc- 
tures that were needed. Funds were lacking, the plans were 
on a vast scale, many difficulties were encountered, but 
S. Martin, who was always very highly honoured at Cluny, 
gave miraculous help. 


* Vita Odonis a Joanne, Migne, P. L. 133. 
*Vita, III, 1. It is remarkable that monastic excess in dress in the 


Middle Ages frequently took the form of very splendid shoes. 





THE GREAT HOUSE OF CLUNY 127 


In 927, Odo obtained a royal charter from Rudolf of 
Burgundy, king of the Franks, confirming the privileges 
granted by the founder, particularly its freedom from royal 
authority and the right of the abbot to coin money. 

The good name of the house and his own prestige were 
greatly enhanced by the much needed and successful reform 
which he carried out at Fleury, an ancient abbey whose 
reputation stood very high from its enshrining the bones of 
S. Benedict and his sister, Scholastica. These had been 
piously stolen from Monte Cassino in the sixth century by 
the second abbot of Fleury, aided first by a miraculous light 
which guided his agent to the shrine, and then by a mist 
which concealed him from pursuing soldiers. ® 

This good work was only the beginning of the splendid 
part that Odo took in the monastic reform which in the early 
tenth century was preparing the way for that brilliant re- 
vival of civilization which so marked the eleventh, a develop- 
ment often attributed (and perhaps with some measure of 
truth) to the general relief that the year 1000 had safely 
passed without bringing the much dreaded end of the world. 

Tirelessly, both in Italy and Gaul, Odo travelled about 
reviving monastic life, which had suffered sorely in the bar- 
barian invasions. Among other houses, Monte Cassino itself, 
which was in a pitiable condition, felt his fostering care. 
He appointed his disciple Baldwin its abbot. 

Combining great powers of organization with a deep 
humility and real delight in helping those he met, sometimes 
in the most menial way, fired by an apostolic fervour and 
animated by the truest piety, Odo was one of the best prod- 
ucts of monasticism in a dark and dreary age. 

While he was crossing the Cottian Alps his party fell in 
with a poor old man staggering under the weight of a sack 


’>The success of the theft is admitted by the Cassinese monk, Paul 
_ Warnefrid, who wrote a History of the Lombards about 775. See Coul- 
ton, Five Centuries of Religion, I, p. 237, seq. 


128 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


of garlic, onions, and bread, which were so evil-smelling that 
John himself got away as far as he possibly could. But for 
miles and miles over the steepest portions of the alpine road, 
while the old man rode upon the Abbot’s horse, the repellent 
load was carried by one of the chief leaders of the Europe of 
that day. When John at length came up, Odo, still bearing 
the load, rebuked him for objecting to the odour of what the 
poor man had to eat and told him it was time to chant some 
psalms.® 

John tells the story against himself. It is so typical of 
Odo’s whole character that it is not at all difficult to account 
for the extraordinary popularity that he and other monks 
were everywhere winning for themselves. Of all the rulers 
that Europe ever knew, none so deserved the people’s love as 
the best and most devoted of the monks. 

Odo may possibly have originated the common proverb: 
“Beauty is only skin-deep,” which occurs in a very character- 
istic passage where the vileness of the body is pointed out in 
language that recalls Buddhism.? He was stricken by mortal 
sickness while in Rome, but by the special favour of S. 
Martin his strength was temporarily restored and he died 
at Tours amid the much loved associations of childhood 
(942 a.p.) 

. Thus very early in its career the Abbey of Cluny showed 


that imperial spirit of solicitude for monastic revival and — 
organization that marked the course of its history. Con- — 


veniently remote from serious royal interference, yet close to 


a chief highway from the north of Europe to Rome, it ha” 


many advantages of site and the growth of its power ¥ 

rapid. 
The story of each newly rising order is monotonously, 

same. The early members displayed a saintly humility 4° 


* Vita, a Joanne monacho, II, 6. Migne, P.L. 133 col. 64. 
col. 556. 


i 


3 
'§. Odonis Collationum Libri Tres, II, ix. Migne, P.L. vol. 13%, : 





THE GREAT HOUSE OF CLUNY 129 


recalls much that is best in the traditions of the Egyptian 
monks; their successors developed a pomp and magnificence 
that is more reminiscent of Louis XIV, or Napoleon. Yet 
no princely abbot at the very worst was such a pest to man- 
kind as the war-lords that Europe breeds. 

The fourth Abbot of Cluny was Maiolus, a man of noble 
birth, the trusted and intimate friend of Otto the Great, and, 
despite his high birth, such an enthusiast for monastic reform 
that he apparently refused the Papacy itself. He was ani- 
mated by the same high spirituality as Odo, dividing all 
spare time between silent prayer and reading, moderate in all 
things, and so devoted to charity that on one occasion he 
improved upon the record of S. Martin himself by giving his 
whole cloak to a beggar.® 

Among other convents of ancient date that in the true 
spirit of Cluny he did something to reform were Lerins itself 
(p. 69) and S. Bénigne at Dijon. (The rebuilt church of 
the latter became the cathedral after the old one had been de- 
stroyed in the French Revolution.) Captured in the defiles 
of the Alps by marauding Saracens, Maiolus is said to have 
converted several of the Moslems, but Cluny was temporarily 
impoverished in order to ransom its Abbot. 

Odilo, the fifth Abbot, who also came of the Burgundian 
nobility, displayed the imperial spirit of Cluny by rebuild- 
ing the cloister ® and other portions in so splendid a style 
that he used to boast that like Cesar Augustus he had found 
his seat of wood but would leave it of marble. It was appar- 
ently his work that distressed the mind of S. Bernard 

p. 231) as being so inappropriate for monks. 

All the time the authority of the Abbot was being ex- 

ided, partly by the foundation of new Cluniac houses and 

artly by the voluntary submission to the central abbey of 


8 Vita Sancti Maioli, auctore Syro monacho, II, 18, Migne, P.L. 137, 
col. 763. 

°Of the cloister there are few remains, but some capitals in the sur- 
viving portions of the church answer to 8. Bernard’s description. 


130 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


older priories. Odilo was intimate with sovereigns, for 
Cluny was ever an aristocratic house.. Even with emperors, 
he associated on something like equal terms. After the coro- 
nation of Henry II, the Pope (Benedict VIII) presented 
publicly to the holy Roman Emperor a golden apple sur- 
mounted by a cross. Gratefully accepting the gift, the sov- 
ereign at once passed it on to the Abbot of Cluny, declaring, 
“Tt is more fitting that this should belong to those who tread 
the pomps of the world underfoot and follow the cross of 
the Saviour.” 1° 

Thus Cluny secured emphatic imperial recognition of-a 
very special place indeed. To its Abbot in preference to any 
one of the princely archbishops of the Rhineland was handed 
the choicest symbolic gift that the Pope could present to the 
Emperor himself. In his favour a German sovereign pre- 
ferred a Frenchman or at least a Burgundian to any of the 
great Teutonic ecclesiastics. 

The impression that the rising magnificence of Cluny was 
making upon unsympathetic outsiders is interestingly set 
forth in the rather laboured lampoon written by Adalbero, 
the Bishop of Laon (p. 193). A monk of the old school was 
sent by him to visit Cluny. He returned in an impossibly 
short time, incredibly transformed.’ 

No longer clothed in monastic garb, but with high pointed 
toes to his shoes and spurs that pricked the ground, he leapt 
off his foaming steed and called for wife and children. The 
Bishop he addressed with clenched fist and stretched-out arm 
without an atom of respect. “JI am a soldier now,” he said, 
“and if a monk, a monk with a difference. Indeed I am no 
longer a monk, but fight at the command of a king, my 
master Odilo.” ™ 

This is hardly the judgement of Odilo that posterity will 


07, M. Smith, Cluny, p. 151. She quotes Rod. Glad, I, 5. 
11 Adalberonis Carmen (ad Rotbertum regem Francorum), lines 80- 
115; Migne, P.L. 141, col. 771, seq. 





THE GREAT HOUSE OF CLUNY — 181 


endorse. He was extremely interested in the effort to end, 
or at least moderate, the pest of war that marked the begin- 
ning of the eleventh century, and he is credited with having 
by divine inspiration instituted the treuga Det, or peace of 
God by which all private war was barred from Saturday 
night till Monday morning.’” 

At least he sought with all his power to deal with what for 
fifteen hundred years has been Europe’s greatest curse.1® 
If he had not all the success that might have been hoped, at 
least our own generation cannot throw many stones. 

There was always apt to be difficulty in adjusting the rela- 
tion of monasticism with the official Church. Basil, in the 
Kast had sought to overcome it by a not very happy expedient 
of amalgamation (p. 47). The early Benedictines had fully 
accepted the decision of the Council of Chalcedon (451 a.p.) 
by which all monasteries were to be subject to the diocesan 
bishops. 

Cluny had been expressly exempted from episcopal con- 
trol, but as (except in Celtic monasteries) it was extremely 
rare—if indeed it was ever the case unless in exceptional 
conditions—that any member of a monastic chapter should 
be in episcopal orders, it was not possible to dispense with 
outside authority for functions that an ordinary priest could 
not perform. As by this time it was the custom that 
most, at any rate, of the monks should be in holy 
orders (p. 95), the question was of frequent occurrence. 
The second prelate of Western Christendom was, in the 
service of the sanctuary, inferior to the bishop of the meanest 
see. 

At the council of Ansa in 1025, Gauzlin, the Bishop of 
Macon, lodged a complaint that, in contempt of his diocesan 

2 Pertz, Scriptores, VIII, 403. Hugo Flaviniac, quoted Smith’s Cluny, 
% 18 Odilo is also credited with the institution of the feast of All Souls 


(Nov. 2d) on the day following All Hallows. To pray for all Christian 
souls was preéminently the duty of the monk. 


132 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


authority, Abbot Odilo had called in another bishop to ordain 
certain monks.** ‘The intruding prelate complained of was 
Burchard, the Archbishop of Vienne. Odilo naturally 
pleaded the charters that exempted his abbey from all dioc- 
esan authority. To this it was objected that no power in 
the Church could override the decrees of an cecumenical 
council and the canons of Chalcedon were precise. An ap- 
peal was made to the Pope, who vigorously took up the 
abbey’s cause and the Bishop of Macon had completely to 
withdraw his claims. 

It would, of course, have been just the same had he 
occupied one of the greatest sees of Christendom, but Cluny 
undoubtedly found it easier to maintain its autonomy because 
of the relative insignificance of the diocese in which it was 
situated. The small porch and octagonal towers of the Cathe- 
dral of S. Vincent, which are all that the fury of the revolu- 
tionists spared, remind one that Macon was one of the lesser 
dioceses of Christendom; the cathedral itself was hardly too 
large to have formed a Lady Chapel to the huge abbey church 
at Cluny. 

The Popes were drawn by unescapable circumstances into 
the position of taking the part of the regular clergy against 
the diocesan bishops. Monasteries’ were definitely cosmo- 
politan and as a rule knew no distinction of country or. of 
race. The secular clergy usually had more local associations 
and as nations began slowly to emerge, as feudalism decayed © 
and the imperial theory grew dim, they were inevitably 
caught up in the movement. 

The medizeval system had no room for a national Church, 
if for no other reason than that it knew no such thing as a 
nation, but at different times such forces as Anglicanism and 
Gallicanism could not be entirely ignored. 

That Hildebrand was a monk of Cluny can now no longer 
be asserted. Indeed doubts have been expressed as to whether 


Mansi, Concilia, XIX, p. 423. 


THE GREAT HOUSE OF CLUNY 133 


he was a monk at all.‘° The point is not of great impor- 
tance; he was undoubtedly inspired by the same great ideals 
as. were the Cluniacs when he determined rigorously to 
enforce ancient canons on all the clergy, and so to build up 
a great theocracy by separating the clergy from all worldly 
interests and giving them no other serious concern than the 
maintenance of that great organization that has made the 
Latin Church by far the most impressive religious fabric 
that the world has ever seen. 

During the latter part of the eleventh century the good 
order of Cluny made so favourable an impression on William 
de Warenne and his wife Gundrada,(?) daughter of William 
the Conqueror, that he founded in his own town of Lewes a 
splendid priory of the same order, thus giving the Cluniaes 
one of the first of their thirty-five English houses. Doubt- 
less the monks knew how worthily to entertain the great ones 
of the earth. Possibly the earl was not very critical of 
monastic magnificence. 

In the second charter to Lewes (1087) the founder recites 
how he and Gundrada, being prevented from passing on to 
Rome because Pope and Emperor were at war, “turned to 
the monastery of Cluny, a great and holy abbey in honour of 


% The only contemporary authority for saying that Hildebrand was a 
Cluniac is Bonizo of Sutri Liber ad amicum (P. Jaffe, Bibliotheca rerum 
Germanicarum, II, 630) and this is worthless. The Catholic Encyclo- 
pedia, Art. Gregory VII, says that Hildebrand was professed in Rome; 
Workman, Hvolution of the Monastic Ideal, p. 229, says that he was not 
a monk; but neither gives any reference. In any case, as Provisor he 
reformed the convent of S. Paul without the Walls, at Rome, and was 
entirely in sympathy with monastic ideals. 

The chief early Western canons concerning clerical marriage were: 
Rome, in 386 a.p. A layman who has married a widow may not be re- 
ceived among the clergy; Hefele, Hist. of Councils, II, p. 387. . Rome, in 
402 a.D. Bishops, priests and deacons must remain unmarried; Hefele, 
II, p. 429. Hippo, in 398 a.p. Bishops and other clergy must not make 
their children independent till their morals are well established. 
Orange, in 441 a.D. Married men may not be ordained deacon unless 
they have made vows of chastity; Hefele, III, p. 163. Second Synod of 
Arles, in 443 or 452 ap. A married-man may not be ordained priest 
unless he consents to divorce; Hefele, III, p. 168. 


134 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


S. Peter; * * * and because we found the sanctity, the 
religion and the charity of that place so great, and we were 
received with such honour by the good Prior and all the 
holy convent into their society and fraternity, we began to 
have a love and devotion towards that order and to 
that house above all others which we had seen”; and they 
had visited many monasteries both in Burgundy and 
France. 

The Stewart family, later to ascend the Scottish throne, 
founded in the twelfth century a Cluniac priory in Paisley. 
This house, in 1245, received from Cluny the extremely rare 
privilege of having an abbot of its own, who duly became a 
lord of the Scottish Parliament. 

Cluny was to know much unpeace in connexion with 
Pontius de Melgueil, a godson of Pope Pascal II, who had 
himself been a monk of that house. Pontius was elected 
Abbot in 1109, and for a time ruled with some success. But 
apparently the dominating position which he held in Chris- 
tendom entirely turned his head. Not content with giving 
offence to many of the Burgundian bishops, he attempted 
definitely to establish his supremacy over the Abbot of Monte 
Cassino as the head of the monastic world. 

Cluny was wealthier than the older house and it had the 
advantage of being at the head of a great and rising order, 
but it had never been associated with anyone at all to be 
compared with S. Benedict. The claim was perhaps in 
accordance with the soaring ambition of Cluny, but it was 
very ill-advised and eventually Pontius was forced to resign 
and go on pilgrimage to the Holy Land. 

The monks of Cluny elected in his place (after another 
who almost immediately died) the greatest of all the line of 
abbots and one of the most admirable and genial men of 
medieval times, Pierre de Montboisier, generally known as 
Peter the Venerable. Vigorously he set himself to the task 
of restoring prosperity to the sadly desolated house, and 


THE GREAT HOUSE OF CLUNY 135 


things were beginning to improve when a chain of new 
troubles made them again still worse. 

Pontius had been finding his residence in the Latin king- 
dom of Jerusalem an insupportable exile. And so to Cluny 
he returned, not in the garb of a penitent but at the head of 
a body of troops. Having stormed the Abbey, he paid his 
brigand followers from the spoils of the very church, and 
resumed his old position in a very novel way. 

He contrived to maintain himself in infamous prosperity 
for the space of about eight months. Then he had to submit 
to a Papal decree declaring that as a usurping, sacrilegious, 
schismatic, and excommunicate person he was deposed from 
the position he had long ceased to adorn.*® 

This extraordinary scandal was the occasion at least in 
part of S. Bernard’s famous “Apology” concerning the 
shortcomings of the monks, and particularly the Cluniacs.** 
He begins with some criticisms of the Cistercians and a pro- 
fession of real friendliness for the older order. But many 
features of their life are most unsatisfactory. Meals are 
sumptuous, well-cooked, and so varied that ‘even when | 

the stomach complains that it is full, curiosity is_ still 

alive.” 18 ) 
' Instead of the reading at meals that S. Benedict pre- 
~seribed (p. 80) small talk and laughter fill the air. There 
is a choice of several kinds of wine and the fact that the 
Rule prescribes “a little” is ignored. The markets of town 
after town have to be ransacked to find cloth enough for the 

7° Peter the Venerable, De Miraculis, Lib. II, cap. xii, Migne, P.L. 189, 
col. 922-924. 

# Apologia ad Guillelmum Sancti Theoderici abbatem, Migne, P.L. 
182, col. 895 seq. 

% A study of the existing remains at Dunfermline seems clearly to 
show that the huge and magnificent kitchen was common to the royal 
palace and the great Augustinian Abbey which enshrined S. Margaret’s 
remains. ‘Matthew of Westminster,” anno 1303, indignantly describes 
the place as one where the chief nobles of Scotland were wont to meet 


to arrange their designs against the king of England, implying that it 
was far more fortress than monastery and therefore fair game in war. 


136 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


dress of the monks, and the religious are clothed in a manner 
that emperors or kings would not disdain. 
Manual labour is done by servants. The pomp of the 


\. Abbot is beyond all bounds: “I have seen an Abbot with 


sixty horses after him, and even more. Would you not 
think, as you see them pass, that they were not fathers of 
monasteries, but lords of castles—not shepherds of souls, but 
princes of provinces ? 

“Then there is the baggage, containing tablecloths, and 
cups, and basins, and candlesticks, and. well-filled wallets,— 
not with the coverlets, but the ornaments of the beds. My 
lord Abbot can never go more than four leagues from his 
house without taking all his furniture with him, as if he were 
going to the wars, or about to cross a desert where necessaries 
cannot be had. Is it quite impossible to wash one’s hands in, 
and drink from, the same vessel? Will not your candle burn 
anywhere but in that gold or silver candlestick of yours 
which you carry with you? Is sleep impossible except upon 
a variegated mattress, or under a foreign coverlet?’ 1° The 
magnificence of the buildings is extremely excessive (p. 230) ; 
the effect of the splendid services was heightened by great 
trees of brass glittering by their jewels quite as much as by 
their numerous candles. 

The Cluniacs had started out with greatly lengthened 
services but not with any strong effort to increase the Bene- 
dictine standard of asceticism. It seems clear from the testi- 
mony of S. Bernard himself that even in the early twelfth 
century the monasteries—at any rate, some of those belong- 
ing to the Cluniac order—were already becoming those 
pleasant clubs of which Chaucer’s monk was a typical inmate 
-—not a saint but a country gentleman and pleasant, friendly 
neighbour. 

For centuries yet the cloister was to attract a large pro- 
portion of the best intellects of Europe. A medizeval “Who’s 

* Trans. by J. C. Morison, Saint Bernard, p. 130. 


THE GREAT HOUSE OF CLUNY 137 


Who” would very largely have been made up of monastic 
names, at least into the fifteenth century. 

The letters of Peter to S. Bernard are couched in an ex- 
ceedingly conciliatory spirit. He addresses the Abbot of 
Clairvaux as ‘‘most dear brother,” wishing him eternal salva- 
tion, and according to his usual custom he describes himself 
as the humble Abbot of Cluny. In courtesy he certainly has 
the better of Bernard, but hardly in argument. 

He cannot deny the substantial truth of most of the allega- 
tions, but he says they are of relatively minor importance. 
Probably he would himself have liked to tighten up Cluniac 
discipline to something nearer the Cistercian standard.”° 

With him the great Abbots of Cluny come to an end. 
Leadership, though not the same power, was to pass to the 
rising order of the Cistercians. From 1528, the Dukes of 
Guise held the great Abbey as commendatory Abbots. By 
the French revolutionary mobs its buildings were wrecked 
and part of what is left of the proud church is now built up 
into the houses of the little town. 


‘BIBLIOGRAPHY: 


The principal authority for the history of Cluny is Bruel; 
Recueil des chartes de Cluny. 

Vols. i-iv are very extensively used in the admirable work on 
the early history of the Abbey, up to the death of Odilo; L. M. 
Smith’s The Early History of the Monastery of Cluny. 

The Carmen of Adalbero is printed in Migne. P.Z. 141. 

Vita Odonis a Joanne monacho, discipulo suo, is printed in 
Migne. P.L. 1383; Vita sancti Maiolt, auctore Syro monacho, Migne. 
P.L. 187. The works of Peter the Venerable are in Migne, P.L. 
189. 

There are very numerous modern works that deal in part with 
Cluny, especially the controversy between S. Bernard and Peter 
the Venerable. Maitland, Dark Ages, has much of the charm 
of early Victorian scholarship in the early days of the Oxford 
Movement. 


*® The letters are printed in Migne, P.L. 189. 8S. R. Maitland, Dark 
Ages, Nos. xxii, xxiil, defends the Cluniacs. G. G. Coulton, Five Centu- 
ries of Religion, vol. i, ch. xxi, with a very much wider knowledge of the 
original documents, is inclined to support the Cistercians. 


CHAPTER IX 
SAINT BERNARD AND THE CISTERCIANS 


There is no real evidence that the Cluniacs ever aimed at 
any more stringent asceticism than the Rule of 8. Benedict 
contemplates. It was largely as a protest against their 
splendour that the Cistercian reforms began. Neither of 
these great orders had a particular rule, being merely Bene- 
dictine developments. 

It was in that part of Burgundy that surrounds Dijon, 
the chief seat of the dukes, on whose southern border stands 
Cluny itself, that the new order came into being. To it we 
are indebted for some of the most beautiful ruins on the 
earth, and many of these are in the British Isles. 

The early suppression of the abbeys in those parts has had 
the satisfactory, though certainly undesigned, result of pre- 
serving large portions of the original medieval buildings, for 
on the Continent nearly every important house reconstructed 
all but the church in the far less picturesque style of \the 
Renaissance. By a law dating from the very beginnings of, 
the order, its houses were never to be in towns. They were 
so frequently in low-lying spots as to give vogue to the 
couplet: 

Bernardus* valles, montes Benedictus amabat, 
Oppida Franciscus, celebres Dominicus urbes. 


Of course there are many exceptions, but Durham and 
Monte Cassino, dominating great stretches of country from 


*So prominent in early Cistercian days as frequently to be regarded 
as the founder of the order. 


138 


SAINT BERNARD AND THE CISTERCIANS 139 


their hill-tops, are typical Benedictine houses; Tintern or 
Rievaulx, nestling beside a stream in a valley with hanging 
woods to shut out the world, are what we look for in the 
houses of Cistercians; the latter is in so narrow a vale that 
the church (contrary to all northern custom) had to be built 
north and south because the space between the river and the 
hillside left no room for it to stand in the usual orientation. 

In the northern portion of the monastic holy land of Bur- 
gundy, the country of famous abbeys, in 1075, a rich convent 
at Molesme had been founded. S. Robert was its Abbot, 
S. Alberic its Prior, when to it came an Englishman from 
Sherborne in Dorset. Stephen Harding was his name. He 
was like-minded with the Abbot and the Prior, but the other 
monks were not. Molesme was growing in wealth, but its 
inmates were not growing in grace, and the stricter brethren 
became earnestly desirous of leading a severer life. 

So they retired to Vivier; but the other monks strongly 
objected to this desertion and so the pioneers of the austerer 
life were induced to return to Molesme. Matters, however, 
did not improve. Dispensations permitted one modification 
of the rules after another. It was very clear that no vigorous 
enforcement of the Benedictine Rule was possible at 
Molesme. 

So, fortified by a special authorization from the Papal 
legate (Hugo, Archbishop of Lyons), the reforming monks 
retired to the wild wastes of Citeaux, a few miles south of 
Dijon, a forbidding spot that was destined to immortal fame. 
Odo, the Duke of Burgundy, who had a palace in the same 
vicinity, confirmed the grant of a site which was made by 
the lord of Beaume. So there, on March 21, 1098, was in- 
augurated the new monastery of S. Mary. Alberic became 
Abbot and Stephen Prior, but by order of Urban IT (at a 
synod which assembled in Rome during the Kastertide of 
1099), S. Robert was sent back to Molesme. 

The new house prospered fairly well. Rules of much 


140 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


rigidity were framed. Manual work in the fields, which was 
entirely below the dignity of the monks of Cluny, was taken 
up once more. Citeaux was to become a great centre for 
monastic farming; the sheep-runs of its order were to be 
known all over Europe. But this was neither planned nor 
foreseen; indeed what was deemed a sheet-anchor against 
wealth was thrown out in the refusal to accept those parochial 
tithes which so many benefactors had presented to the Bene- 
dictine convents, and which were in many cases the backbone 
of their resources. 

When Alberic died, in 1109, Stephen succeeded him as 
Abbot, and in that capacity he attended the Council of Troyes 
(p. 199). So intense was his zeal for poverty and simplicity 
that he actually refused to allow the periodic visits to Citeaux 
even of the premier duke of Christendom, Hugo, the suc- 
cessor of Odo. 

This step was the more significant as Odo, who had died 
on a crusade, in 1102, was buried in the abbey church. 
Stephen had a very just presentiment that he must make a 
definite choice between the constant presence of princes in 
the cloister and a rigidlly ascetic life for the community. 

Such rigour did not appeal to all. Cistercian novices were 
few. Citeaux was before long in a most depressed material 
state. Many of the monks had died. Funds were running 
low. Despite the excellent beginnings made, it is quite pos- 
sible that the house would have had no more distinguished a 
career than hundreds of other abbeys scattered over Europe, 
but that its reputation for asceticism and, indeed, its very 
misfortunes, were a keen attraction to certain serious minds. 
In 1114, a party of novices came to be admitted, including 
one of the greatest men of any age. 

It was to be the peculiar glory of Cistercianism to nurture, 
and to be moulded by, one of the few men who in different 
centuries since the fall of the Roman Empire may be said to 
have ruled Europe. And in many respects he was the most 


SAINT BERNARD AND THE CISTERCIANS 141 


remarkable ruler that Europe ever knew. Unlike Hildebrand 
and Innocent IIT, he held no high office in the Church. Un- 
like Louis XIV and Napoleon, he was unsupported by a 
single gun. Unlike Barbarossa and Frederick II, he inher- 
ited no great office which shed a lustre upon its possessor to 
the very bounds of Christendom. 

Unlike the great Abbots of Cluny, he ruled not as the 
holder of an elevated post but purely from the force of his 
own character. Unlike almost all other leaders of every 
time, he incurred the awful curse of Nietzsche on those who 
have the power to rule, but not the will. He might have sat 
in S. Peter’s chair. He was begged to accept the command 
of an army in which kings and an emperor served, and which 
was perhaps the most imposing that Europe up to that time 
had ever raised. 

Rude and untutored in every way the twelfth century 
doubtless was, but when we look round on the force-respect- 
ing world in which our own lot is cast, we must incline our 
heads in quiet homage to an age that insisted upon being 
ruled by simple goodness; that in every great crisis placed 
the reins in the hands of one whose pure character was a 
compelling force before which all who ever met it—from 
Pope and emperor to the poorest churl—bowed in a reverent 
awe that is impressive even across the vicissitudes of more 
than seven centuries. 

Of all the world’s great leaders, S. Bernard of Clairvaux - 
depends for his greatness more than any other on pure saintli- 
ness. He was in the very truest sense the mouthpiece of the 
ideal aspirations of the age in which he lived. His sermons 
and his letters are full of the superiority of the work of 
serving God in the cloister to any other duty, the eternal 
song of monasticism. 

No better man ever trod this earth. It is not presumptuous 
overmuch to compare his character even with that of the 

Thus Spake Zarathustra, p. 215, English ed. 


142 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


Incarnate Son of God Himself. Born in a castle, heir at will 
to a fair domain, brought up by a saintly mother, he was 
utterly unmoved by any care for the pomp of power, the 
luxury, or even the most ordinary comforts of this 
present world. Communing with his God in quiet prayer 
and meditation meant for him what it has meant for 
few. 

So entirely was he wrapped up in the heavenly vision that 
on one occasion he rode for a whole day along the shores of 
the Lake of Geneva without noticing even the splendid sheet 
of water beside the road. William of S. Thierry (p. 153), 
his enthusiastic biographer, tells us: “I remained with him 
for a few days (at Clairvaux), unworthy though I was, and 
in whatever direction I turned my eyes I wonderingly saw as 
it were a new heaven and a new earth, and the foot-paths 
of the ancient monks of Egypt, our fathers, with the steps 
of the men of our own time in them. The golden age ap- 
peared to have returned at Clairvaux when men once rich 
and honoured in the world were glorying in the poverty of 
Christ.” 8 

Perhaps, indeed, the saintliness of S. Bernard stands out 
in all the clearer light because in some respects it was but- 
tressed by but little earthly vision. , He forced a half unwill- 
ing continent to rush into the disastrous Second Crusade 
against the best judgment of very many whose opinions were 
entitled to respect. The last of the Fathers, he entirely repu- 
diated the scholastic speculations of Abélard, and yet so 
failed to realize the future direction of Ultramontane ortho- 
doxy that he combated the doctrine of the Immaculate Con- 
ception of the Virgin, and in his letters speaks to Popes with 
decidedly less deference than modern conceptions would 
demand. 

Such prosperity and such numbers now came to Citeaux 
that colonies were sent out to settle daughter houses. In_ 

* Vita Prima, cap. VII; Migne, P.L. 185a, col. 247. 


SAINT BERNARD AND THE CISTERCIANS 143 


1114, Hugh, once lord of Macon but now a humble monk, 
led a band to found Pontigny (p. 120) and next year S. Ber- 
nard led another to Clairvaux—both in the same Burgundian 
land of monasteries that included also Citeaux, Cluny, and 
Molesme. 7 

The daughter houses were not made independent, but 
formed the nucleus of the new Cistercian order, far less cen- 
tralized than that of Cluny, but binding the daughters to the 
mother house in a way that the Benedictines did not. 

Our Lady was the patron of the whole order; to her every 
house was dedicated, and on one occasion Christ was said to 
have spared the world for the sake of her Cistercian 
friends. 

In 1116, the first General Chapter was held, and at that 
of 1119 was drawn up the Carta Caritatis,* a constitution 
providing for a yearly General Chapter of all the Abbots of 
the order at Citeaux, whose Abbot was given a most com- 
manding position, but not the autocracy that belonged to his 
brother of Cluny. 

In these early years the real headquarters of Cistercianism 
was not the mother house. From his cell and his arbour at 
Clairvaux S. Bernard was ruling a continent, and that in a 
truer sense than many a crowned king. 

We visualize rather the ante-room of an emperor’s palace 
than a poor little abbey in a passage from one of Bernard’s 
letters to Peter the Venerable: “I grieved that I was not able 
to answer according to my feelings; because the evil of the 
day, which was great, called me away. For a vast multitude, 
out of almost every nation under heaven, had assembled. It 
was my place to answer every one; because for my sins I was 
born into the world that I might be confounded with many 
and multifarious anxieties.” ° 


“Migne, P.L. 166, col. 1377. 
5 Letter quoted in No. XXV, Maitland’s Dark Ages, p. 432. The letter 
was by the hand of his secretary, Nicholas. 


144 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


It may be doubted whether in the whole course of history 
‘any leader supported neither by force nor by high office ever 
gained the confidence of Europe as did 8. Bernard. In 11380, 
after the death of Honorius II, two rival Popes were elected, 
and in such circumstances that it was really a debatable 
question which was more canonically chosen. Europe was 
divided. Anacletus IL was in firm possession of Rome and 
had been a Cluniac monk. He had received a majority of 
the votes of the cardinals, but his rival, Innocent II, had 
been elected first. 

A council was summoned to Etampes by the French king, 
Louis VI. Christendom might easily have been torn and 
the great schism anticipated but that a man was there who 
commanded the confidence of all. 

To Bernard the question was referred. It is extremely 
characteristic of the man that his decision was not swayed 
by any sort of expediency but based solely on the merits of 
the case. After a careful enquiry into all the circumstances 
of the election, and influenced, it appears, still more by the 
characters of the two men, he declared for the candidate who 
materially was the weaker. He pronounced Innocent to be 
the true Pope. 

The council instantly accepted the decision. Europe did 
not. It required the personal intervention of S. Bernard to 
induce Henry II of England and the Emperor Lothaire to 
recognize the Pope he had chosen, but no one could ever 
resist the iron will and the stern and saintly character of 
the unbending Abbot of Clairvaux. 

Nothing can be better evidence of this than the fact that 
the powerful King Roger of Sicily, a violent partisan of 
Anacletus, feared to meet 8. Bernard face to face, especially 
after he had travelled through Italy in a series of triumphal 
marches in the interests of his Pope, reconciling Pisa with 
Genoa and many other rivals with each other, dominating a 
council at Pisa, and even winning over the great city of 


SAINT BERNARD AND THE CISTERCIANS 145 


Milan, whose archbishop had been strong for Anacletus.® 
Not till the death of the antipope was the matter finally 
disposed of, but his feeble successor was easily prevailed 
upon by 8. Bernard to make his submission to Innocent. 

The First Crusade had set up the Christian kingdom of 
Jerusalem (p. 199), but its subsequent fall had made it very 
evident that only by constant support from Europe could its 
existence be made secure. The zeal that Pope Urban IT had 
kindled at Clermont had largely died away. There was a 
strong feeling that further attempts would not be well ad- 
vised. But to S. Bernard all mere worldly considerations 
were utterly base. To his pure and unspotted devotion the 
insults that infidels were offering to the very places where his 
Master had trod, overbore all else that could be urged. He 
was fired by a new enthusiasm as holy as it was pure, and 
through a great part of Europe his fervid character lit up 
again the flames that had burned a generation before. 

With the same enthusiasm as at Clermont, all classes put 
on the cross. S. Bernard’s success in Germany was all the 
more remarkable that the great bulk of his hearers could not 
understand his language, but yielded to a personal mag- 
netism that the world never saw excelled. 

It must have been one of the most impressive scenes in all 
history when at Mass in the cathedral at Spires, moved by 
a sudden impulse to deliver an impassioned address, S. Ber- 
nard induced the reluctant Emperor, Conrad III, to take the 
eross. The sovereign was moved to tears and promised to go, 
before the vast congregation, which broke forth into uncon- 
trollable enthusiasm.’ 

The Second Crusade was extremely disastrous, as those 
rare enterprises in which Germans and French march side 
by side are somewhat apt to be. As moral unity was needed 


‘Vita Prima, Lib. secundus; auctore Ernaldo, abbate Bone-vallis, 
caps. I, Il; Migne, P.L. 185a, col. 268 seq. 
7 Vita Prima, cap. IV; Migne, P.L. 185a, cols. 381-382. 


146 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


more even than military skill, it is by no means impossible 
that if S. Bernard had accepted the command and injected 
into every crisis of difficulty and peril his own marvellous 
personality, the result might have been different. He showed 
himself personally unmoved by the unpopularity that he in- 
evitably incurred when the shattered and discredited rem- 
nants of the splendid armies of Christendom straggled back 
to their homes. He tried to justify the ways of Heaven by 
the ordinary argument that we can see but very little of the 
great designs of God. 

The extremely far-reaching influence of S. Bernard. was 
shown when, in 1140, he successfully intervened to prevent 
a nephew of King Steoien being elevated to the archbishop- 
ric of York. The rival, Henry Murdach, died in possession 
of the see, but the king was furious, and it was in connexion 
with this matter that the friends of his nephew William laid 
waste the great Cistercian abbey of Fountains, giving occa- 
sion for the erection of the magnificent conventual buildings 
whose ruins today form one of the most complete religious 
houses that the Middle Ages have bequeathed to our own 
generation. 

In a way, perhaps, the climax of S. Bernard’s life was his 
famous encounter with Abélard at the Council of Sens in 
1140.8 The two men were both of noble birth and both were 
monks, but there all resemblance ceased. S. Bernard was, 
tried by every imaginable standard, the very finest flower of 
monasticism. Abélard was singularly unfitted to the cloister, 
brilliant, erratic, and restless, far too much interested in life 
to have any real desire to abandon the world. S. Bernard’s 
whole soul was with the past; he ends the long line of the 
Fathers of the Church. Perhaps no one who ever lived felt 
with more perfect sincerity that heaven was his true home. 


‘This was held in the Senonensem Metropolitanum, probably the ex- 
isting cathedral still unfinished at the time. See Vita Prima, Lib. III, 
auctore Gaufrido, cap. V; Migne, P.L., 185a, cols. 310-311. 


SAINT BERNARD AND THE CISTERCIANS 147 


Abélard, with his fearless speculation, boldly faced the 
future, anticipating very much of the spirit of the modern 
world. §. Bernard was a devout Churchman who counted 
doubt a sin. Abélard was a keenly critical logician, treating 
S. Augustine himself with the utmost freedom, boldly 
asking: “How far are they worthy of attention who 
assert that faith is not to be built up or defended by rea- 
son ?” 

Yet that erratic Breton, so intensely human, in some 
respects at least, interests us far more than the sternly devout 
Burgundian. Abélard’s youth in the Breton castle, with its 
intense eagerness for study, his conflict with William of 
Champeaux and brilliant career in the schools of Paris, his 
romantic marriage with the sweet and unselfish Héloise, his 
daring but tactless questioning of the things his age held 
dearest, his restless wanderings, his founding of the Para- 
clete which eventually he made over to his wife with her 
nuns, his desperate resolve at one time to seek refuge and 
freedom among the Moslems, his old age spent in long medi- 
tation under the lime tree at Cluny, ever facing towards the 
Paraclete where Héloise was living, his eventual burial there 
where his loving wife was to be laid to rest beside him, united 
in death after the long and sad separation of life—all form 
one of the most humanly interesting stories of medisval 
years. 

_ Cousin declares that Abélard was the chief founder of the 
philosophy of the Middle Ages.? Huis conceptualism, main- 
taining that by the faculty of pure thought, and not through 
the senses alone, we can and must form general ideas, pro- 
vides a middle ground between nominalism and realism. In 
any philosophical discussion he might expect to be able very 
easily to carry S. Bernard beyond his depth. S. Bernard 
had come to Sens unwillingly, at the eager solicitation of his 
friends. The two men could find but little common ground. 
° Owvrages Ined, Introd., p. IV. 


148 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


S. Bernard looked upon the faith as purely a matter of the 
heart. Abélard regarded Christianity as a series of theses 
to be argued about like any other problems in philosophy. A 
brilliant company had gathered, and many of them sympa- 
thized with Abélard. 

But all his philosophy broke down at once. He could not 
any more than others stand up against the pure character 
and compelling personality of S. Bernard. After a deplor- 
able effort, he broke down and merely stuttered that he 
appealed to the Pope. On his own principles it would seem 
to have been quite inconsistent. His condemnation was a 
foregone conclusion. 

It is to the eternal credit of Cluny that Peter the Vener- 
able offered him a home, and after his death he wrote a most 
sympathetic letter to Héloise ascribing to divine providence 
the fact that so honoured a philosopher and servant of Christ 
had enriched the abbey with a gift more precious than topaz 
and gold.?° | 

Although the matter in dispute was relatively not ver 
important, S. Bernard enjoyed no more striking personal 
triumph than he won over William, the Duke of Aquitaine.*! 
This man was deemed one of the most formidable princes of 
his time, not only on account of ‘his wide dominions and 
great military power, but also because of his gigantic 
streneth and violent temper. He had expelled certain 
bishops from their sees and utterly refused to restore 
them. 

No one seems to have dared to beard this lion and even 
S. Bernard in a long interview could do absolutely nothing 
to budge him. Dr. Storrs says: “It was almost like reason- 
ing with a tropical storm, or addressing arguments to the 
brutal fierceness of a wild beast. S. Bernard broke off the 


1 Hpistole, Lib. IV, xxi; Migne. P.L. 189, cols. 347-353. 
“The incident is very fully described in Vita Prima; Lib. Sec. auctore 
Ernaldo, abbate Bone-vallis, cap. VI. Migne, P.L. 185a, cols. 289-291. 


SAINT BERNARD AND THE CISTERCIANS 149 


useless discussion and proceeded to the church to celebrate 
mass.” 1° 

Shortly he issued bearing with arms uplifted the sacred 
Host; with flashing face and burning eyes he again con- 
fronted the monster. He now asked if he would dare defy 
the very Judge of all the earth at Whose dread tribunal he 
must one day appear? Who was present in very truth in 
Bernard’s hands. Amid the hushed awe of the assembled 

knights the prince quailed. He could not even stand. 
_ Meekly he bowed to the overmastering will of a man who 
physically was weak as he was strong. The bishops were 
immediately restored. The duke seems never to have recov- 
ered from the blow. 

S. Bernard had added another to his many triumphs. 
And yet how utterly ashamed he would have felt could he 
have seen the future, when the grandson of that duke, 
Richard, Coeur de Lion, sarcastically told by the hermit 
Fulk de Neuilly to get husbands for his daughters, whose 
names were Luxury, Greed, and Pride, was able to make 
the withering retort: ‘The husband of Luxury shall be the 
prelates of Holy Church; of Pride the Knights Templars; 
Greed may most appropriately be wedded to the monks of 
the Cistercian order.” 1% 

There was possibly a little tinge of ingratitude in the last 
reference, seeing that, only three years previously, the Cis- 
tercians had been made to contribute a whole year’s wool 
towards the ransom of the king.’* 

Great and marvellous indeed as 8S. Bernard’s triumphs 
were, they had been strangely personal, curiously uncon- 
nected. He was the dictator of Europe in a truer sense, 
though less spectacular, than Napoleon. He had far more 

2 Bernard of Olairvaux; the Times, the Man, and His Work, by R. 
S. Storrs, p. 168. 

"Flores Historiarwm, 1197 AvD., Rolls Series, vol. ii, pp. 116-117 


(from Hoveden). 
44 Matthew Paris, Chronica Maiora, vol. ii, p. 399. 


150 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


power than he ever used. His authority ended only with 
his death, for moral force in the long run is invariably 
greater than material. He passed as greatly as he had lived; 
his career ended neither in St. Helena nor in Doorn. 

He built his life into the noble structure of medieval 
monasticism; yet for himself he reared no monument. It 
was the very last thing that he would have desired. In his 
lifetime none ever dared to stand up to him. Churls, 
knights, sovereigns, emperors, and even popes quailed before 
the compelling force of a character whose pure holiness gave 
to him much of the authority of an angel from above. But 
perhaps for that reason S. Bernard stands rather apart 
from the world. He handed down no great tradition. Even 
his own order soon ceased to be permeated by his spirit. 
(See p. 242.) 

But although the extreme severity that was his ideal did 
not last very long, we get some most impressive proofs of 
its intensity in buildings that may still be studied. The 
original parts of Jerpoint Abbey in Ireland, dating from the 
middle of the twelfth century and so probably erected in 
S. Bernard’s lifetime, are as severe as could possibly be 
wished. 

The chapter house consists of a rude tunnel vault of the 
roughest rubble starting from the ground each side and pre- 
senting a most forbidding sense of gloom and darkness the 
moment it is entered. And amid the simple beauty of much 
of the later Cistercian work, the rude structures of the first 
generation of monks have in many places been preserved. 
_ In S. Bernard’s own lifetime, at the General Chapter of 

the Cistercians in 1152, there are hints that monks were 
beginning to eat flesh and that some houses were already 
engaging in gainful trade.1® Owning vast estates, their 
houses exclusively in the open country, working hard with 


* For details of this see Coulton, Five Centuries of Religion, vol. i, 
p. 336. 


SAINT BERNARD AND THE CISTERCIANS 151 


their own hands, the monks of S. Bernard’s order were soon 
widely known for their enormous commerce in wool. It was 
largely grown on their land in the north of England and 
shipped from the wharves of Norwich and other ports to the 
Flemish marts. 

Posterity must be very grateful that they spent their 
money in raising those marvellous abbeys that give York- 
shire and many other parts of Europe what to many is their 
greatest charm; it may well be doubted if the great indus- 
tries of today are preparing any similar heirlooms for future 
years. 

Monastic history is full of the strangest paradoxes, and 
surely none is stranger than that the order which, under 
Stephen Harding and 8. Bernard, so laboured to prevent 
even the most decent comfort for its zealous monks, should 
have become one of the most wealthy commercial corpora- 
tions of all Europe, and indeed it may plausibly be argued 
that the Cistercian order was the chief pioneer of modern | 
industrial capitalism. Largely at least it controlled the 
staple trade of the country whose chancellor sat on the wool- 
sack. Kings complained of its greed. 

One result of this agricultural and commercial spirit was 
a great development of Cistercian conversi, or lay brothers. 
Probably they were recruits who were unable to be monks 
because they could not read nor write. They had their sepa- 
rate quarters in the west side of the cloister with their own 
choir in the nave of the church. Their labour greatly en- 
riched the order—with the inevitable result. The Benedic- 
tine custom of pittances, or extra dishes provided for on 
particular days by special endowments, appeared in Cister- 
cian houses. In many of their ruined dwellings may be 
studied the misericord or chamber in which meat might be 
eaten—in the refectory strictly forbidden—and the second 
kitchen in which it might be cooked. 

The story of the Cistercian order in later days is much the 


152 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


same as that of others. Richelieu was at one time Abbot in 
commendam of Citeaux, which practically meant that he 
took the revenues but had no duties to perform. He failed, 
despite a vigorous effort, to bring about any real reform. 
Yet from within this order was a movement to rise, going 
back to the utmost vigour of earliest years, and forward to a 
new and excellently useful sphere. 

A convent in Normandy at La Trappe had been founded 
in 1140. Its commendatory Abbot in the seventeenth cen- 
tury (Aimend Jean de Rancé) became its regular Abbot in 
1664, and he set on foot a reform that carried asceticism 
further than the West had known before—at least in perma- 
nent form. 

Strict silence, the hardest work, and the plainest fare 
kept away all but the very most earnest souls. Eventually 
a virtually new order emerged and it carried its work over 
all the world. At Marianhill in Natal it still maintains one 
of the most interesting of all the missions to the negro race. 
In its church, the Bantu are invited to kneel before a black 
Madonna. In 1898, the Trappist monks restored the ruined 
convent at Citeaux to its earliest use. 

It is apt to be while musing amid the enchanting creeper- 
clad ruins of some Cistercian house. such as Fountains, that 
one falls in love with monasticism. Great banks of trees 
shut out the troubles of the world; the murmuring stream 
is whispering of peace. The size and beauty of the conven- 
tual buildings witness to a solid comfort, and the great chim- 
ney of the warming house seems to suggest a pleasant social 
life. The quiet cloister breathes the atmosphere of peace, 
and the long-drawn broken arches of the vast and lofty 
church invite to quiet prayer. 

How the place must have been loved by the really earnest- 
minded monk to whom the early green of spring and the 
autumn golds and russet browns of the surrounding woods, 
and the wild flowers and butterflies and birds seemed a 


SAINT BERNARD AND THE CISTERCIANS 153 


foretaste of that eternal paradise to which the abbey was the 
gate. 

Such may be the inevitable reflexions of the modern tourist 
—not of the medieval monk. It is rather a shock to find 
Matthew Paris relating the story of certain strict monks of 
S. Mary’s, York, coming “ad quendam locum horrorts et 
vaste solitudinis sctlicet in convallem profundam et opacem’”’ 
in that terribly forbidding spot to found the Abbey of 
Fountains.*® 

From medieval writings it is very clear that the monks 
preserved to the end the old ideals of the Egyptian desert. 
Even in later times, but very typical of the medizval mind, 
we find S. John of the Cross, the Carmelite mystic, exclaim- 


ing: ‘The spiritual Christian ought to suppress all joy in: 


created things, because it is offensive in the sight of God.17 
In his real and genuine love of the beauties of this world 
the great S. Basil stands almost alone among monks (p. 40). 


BIBLIOGRAPHY: 


The Letters and other works of S. Bernard, including the four 
Lives by various writers, are printed in Migne, P.L. 182-185b, 
five volumes. 

A fairly full account of the founding of the Cistercian order 
and of Stephen Harding is given in William of Malmesbury’s 
Chronicle of the Kings of England, bk. IV, ch. I, p. 347 seq., in 
J. A. Giles’ English ed. 

J. T. Fowler: Cistercian Statutes, in Latin, with English notes. 

Secondary authorities are Cistercian Origins; Life of Stephen 
Harding, ed. by Cardinal Newman. J. ©. Morison, Life and 
Times of Saint Bernard, an extremely well-written work. J. B. 
Dalgairns, Life of St. Stephen Harding, ch. xv; A Day at Citeauz. 
Richard S. Storrs, Bernard of Clairvaux. FE. Vacandard, Vie de 
S. Bernard, 2 vols. There is much on the same subject in books 
already cited by Coulton, Workman, and S. R. Maitland. 


6 Chron., Mai, 1127. 
™ Ascent of Mt. Carmel, bk. III, ch. 19. 


CHAPTER X 
THE RISE OF THE FRIARS 


Dean Milman has said: “It was this wonderful attribute 
of the monastic system to renew its youth, which was the 
life of medizval Christianity; it was ever reverting of itself 
to the first principles of its constitution.* 

The context is S. Bernard and the Cistercians. The 
observation appears to be even more justified in connexion 
with the rise of the friars, associated as that is with the 
career of the figure in monastic story that appears to interest 
the modern world far more deeply than any other, S. Francis 
of Assisi*. One of his own disciples, Father Cuthbert, has 
called him, “the most inspiring personality in medieval 
Christendom.” * His story is an oft told tale. His father 
was disappointed and indeed disgusted that a boy of such 
unusual promise would not attempt to gain success in the 
conventional paths of the world. 

S. Francis might indeed by doing that Wane kept the 
goodwill of the folk of an obscure little town, have lived 
respected and died lamented, but to the world Ae yay 

By following the rough paths along which his own con- 
science beckoned, that boy has given associations to the little ~ 
town that have made Assisi one of the best known spots on 


2 History of Latin Christianity, vol. iv, p. 156 (bk. VIII, ch. iv). 

7G. K. Chesterton has recently entered the field with a little book, 
St. Francis of Assisi. No other monastic saint has so many popular 
lives in English. , 

*Chapter in The Lady Poverty, ed. by Montgomery Carmichael, on 
Spiritual Significance of Evangelical Poverty, p. 144. 


154 


THE RISE OF THE FRIARS 155 


earth, has added to Christianity traditions as imperishable 
as any of older date, has founded a religious order that, not 
content with a vigorous revival from end to end of Christen- 
dom, has carried the Gospel in a literal sense from China to 
Peru, and has gained for himself a name and a fame that 
is hardly equalled by that of any saint since apostolic days. 
The happy romanticism of youth he made a possession of the 
Church for all the ages that were to come. 

The study of his life enables one to realize something of 
the spirit in which the authors of the Song of the Three 
Holy Children felt so lively a brotherhood with all created 
things. 

In most respects, indeed, S. Francis was a typical inheritor 
and reinterpreter of the ancient monastic tradition, but he 
was very much more. His feeling of fellowship with all 
nature brought a new and splendid joyousness, not merely 
into the inheritance of asceticism, but into the very wor- 
ship of the Church itself. Everything from the sun down- 
ward he felt to be a brother or a sister.‘ 

In the sermon which he preached to the birds,’ he seems 
to revive and in a manner to consecrate anew one of the very 
oldest traditions of Christian monasticism. “My little sis- 


“An extremely valuable critical work on the subject is Saint Francis 
of Assisi and His Legend, by Nino Tamassia. The Paduan professor 
points out how very largely Thomas of Celano (author of the Dies Ire), 
the chief original authority for the life of 8S. Francis, plagiarises from 
such earlier monastic writers as Gregory the Great, Sulpicius Severus, 
and Cassian. His English translator, Lonsdale Ragg, does not consider 
that this very materially affects the credibility of the actual incidents, 
seeing that all monastic (and other) lives of the saints are couched in 
most strikingly similar language. Very much the same might be said of 
much of the original literature concerning S. Ignatius Loyola in post- 
medieval times. In truth, there is no need to stop at the frontiers of 
Christendom. The story of S. Francis of Assisi has many points of re- 
semblance with that of Buddha. It is impossible to read of such Japa- 
nese religious men as Kobo Daishi, and to listen to the local legends that 
are still told about his life, without being reminded of many of the 
Christian saints. The early Jesuits knew well how to use such re- 
semblances. 

5’ Fioretti (Little Flowers), 16. 


156 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


ters, birds, much bounden are ye unto God, your Creator, 
and alway in every place ought ye to praise him, for that 
He hath given you liberty to fly about everywhere, and hath 
also given you double and triple raiment; still more are ye 
beholden to Him for the element of the air which He hath 
appointed for you; beyond all this, ye sow not neither do ye 
reap; and God feedeth you, and giveth you the streams 
and fountains for your drink, the mountains and valleys 
for your refuge, and the high trees whereon to make your 
nests.” 

S. Francis has sometimes, but quite unfairly, been accused 
of pantheism. Such things can be said only by those un- 
familiar with monastic traditions. The monk has ever felt 
the brotherhood of birds and beasts (p. 19). S. Francis 
imported a love of nature that is largely his own, though to 
some degree he shares it with Anselm and Hugh of Lincoln. 
In 8S. Francis, it is not so much the love of scenery that 
S. Basil felt (p. 40) as a most intense sentiment of fellow- 
ship with beasts and flowers and birds. 

Monks and friars ® are in these days very often confounded 
as if they were practically the same. That would have been 
impossible in Chaucer’s age, but it was common by the time 
of Luther. The very words explain what the essential dif- 
ference was. The monk was supposed to live alone, to medi- 
tate and pray, the friar to live in brotherly relations with 
the world. 

Indeed the friars, unlike the earlier orders, were insti- 
tuted to do a special work, not merely to save their own 
souls. Theirs it was to minister to the outcast, to seek the 
downtrodden and the aftlicted, in fact to supplement the 
work of the parish clergy. The message of the monk had 
been communal, setting an example of ordered social life 


*The four orders of friars, mentioned in Chaucer’s Prologue, were 
Franciscans, Grey Friars, or Minorites; Dominicans, Black Friars, or 
Friars Preachers; Carmelites, or White Friars; Austin or Eremite 
Friars. 


THE RISE OF THE FRIARS 157 


that had made an immense appeal to the whole world of 
Northern Christendom (p. 177). 

The appeal of the friar was far more individual. There 
can be no doubt that the friars helped to bring about in the 
thirteenth century a remarkable religious revival, but the 
great movement that was mainly responsible for the era of 
cathedral building came very largely from the laity. — 

The espousals of 8. Francis with the Lady Poverty is 
superbly represented on the vault of the lower church at 
Assisi, and yet amidst such magnificent surroundings not 
entirely without a suggestion of satire. The conception 
reflects the atmosphere in which the friars were to live. 
S. Benedict refused to permit the monks to own anything 
at all, but this had been rendered largely nugatory as the 
convents might hold property to any extent. 

So S. Francis would permit neither friar nor order to 
own property of any sort. The devoted lives of the friars 
were so to be approved of all men that necessary provisions 
should never fail, and anything more was to be avoided. 
The friars were to live by begging, and so if they ceased to 
be popularly approved they could not live at all. 

Like SS. Pachomius, Basil, Augustine, and Benedict of 
old, S. Francis found a woman to share his ideals and to 
interpret them to her own sex; not, indeed, a sister, but the 
noble Clare. “She gave her heart to S. Francis and he, in 
- turn, consecrated it to God.” 7 

Each was in love with the other, but it was not an earthly 
love; for both of them the love of virginity and of the 
Saviour was an absorbing and overmastering passion, far 
stronger than any emotion of the world. Clare organized the 
friaresses at San Damiano as S. Francis organized the friars 
at the Portiuncula. She lived for many years after S. Fran- 
cis was dead; the influence of the poor Clares reached far 
beyond the limits of the order. 


™Fr. Robinson, Life of St. Clare, p. 36. 


158 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


In reading the Rule of S. Francis ® one is struck by the 
marked absence of that clear Roman love of order which is 
so prominent in the Rule of S. Benedict. “The rule and life 
of the brothers minor is this, to observe and keep the holy 
gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, living in obedience without 
property and in chastity.” 

Only the provincials ® may receive new brethren. “And 
- In nowise it may be lawful to them to forsake this religion, 
after and according to the commandment of the Pope, for, 
after the saying of the holy gospel, no man putting his hand 
to the plow and looking backwards is apt to the kingdom of 
heaven. * * * And all the brethren must be clothed with 
simple and vile clothing. And they may piece them and 
amend them with pieces of sackcloth, or with other pieces 
with the blessing of God. 

“The clerks shall do their divine service after the order 
or use of the holy Church of Rome. * * * And they shall 
pray for them that be dead. And they shall fast from the 
feast of all hallowtide unto the nativity of our Lord. * * * 
I counsel also warn and exhort my brethren in our Lord 
Jesus Christ that they brawl not * * * but that they be 
meek, peaceable, soft, gentle, and courteous and lowly, hon- 
estly speaking and answering to every man as unto them ?° 
accordeth and belongeth. And they shall not ride, but if 
they be constrained by evident necessity or else by sickness. 

“T command steadfastly and straitly to all the brethren 
that in nowise they receive any manner of coin or money, 
but care shall be taken of the sick. 

“The brethren to whom God hath given grace and strength 


®It has come down in several forms. I have used an early English 
translation, printed in Monumenta Franciscana, Rolls Series, vol. ii, p. 
65, from the fifteenth century Cottonian MS., Fustina D. IV, R. How- 
lett, ed. I have modernized the spelling. 

° That is an officer charged with the oversight of all the monasteries 
of a certain district, more or less answering to a bishop in the secular 
Church. 

It is interesting to note that this common grammatical blunder is 
as old as the fifteenth century. 


THE RISE OF THE FRIARS 159 


to labour, shall labour truly and devoutly, so and in such 
wise that Idleness, the enemy of the soul, excluded and put 
away, they quench not the inward fervour and spirit of 
holy prayer and devotion. 

“The brethren shall nothing appropriate to them, neither 
in housing nor in lands, nor in rent nor in any manner of 
thing, but like pilgrims and strangers in this world, in pov- 
erty and meekness, serving Almighty God. They shall faith- 
fully, boldly and surely and meekly go for alms. Nor they 
shall not nor ought to be ashamed, for our Lord made Him- 
self poor in this world. * * * This should be your portion 
the which will lead you to the land of quick and living 
people. To which my most well-beloved brethren, utterly 
knit and conjoined, you shall never desire other thing under 
Jesus for the love of our Lord Jesus Christ.*? 

“The brethren shall not preach in the diocese of any bishop 
when it is of him to them forbidden, and none of the brethren 
shall be so bold to preach to the people, but if he be of the 
general minister of this brotherhood examined, approved, 
and admitted of him to the office of preaching. 

“And those that be unlearned shall not busy themself to 
be lettered and learned; but they should attend and take heed 
above all things, and desire to have the sprite of our Lord 
and his holy operation to pray always to almighty God with 
a pure spirit and a clean heart.” 

The friars must never enter nunneries unless by special 
permission from Rome. “Nor they may not be godfathers 
or gossips of men or women, lest thereby rumour or slander 
should rise of the brethren amongst the brethren. 

“Whosoever of the brethren, by divine inspiration, will 
go among the Saracens or other infidels they shall axe license 
thereof of their ministers provincial.” 

The ideal is admirably illustrated in the “Sacrum Com- 


11For certain details as to the government of the order here pre 
vided, see p. 19€. 


160 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


mercium,’* or the Marriage of St. Francis with the Lady 
Poverty,” written probably in the fourteenth century by 
some author entirely unknown, presumably a Franciscan 
friar. It is a charming allegory about the origin of the 
new order. Avarice, the great rival of the Lady Poverty, 
has captured the older orders, taking the name of Discretion. 

“After a time some of the religious began to sigh most 
lamentably for the flesh-pots of Egypt which they had left 
behind. * * * In short, they began to fawn upon the world, 
striking bargains with worldlings. * * * They enlarged 
their buildings and multiplied those things they had for 
ever renounced. * * * They eagerly frequented the courts 
of kings and princes that they might join house to house and 
lay field to field.” 

We then get a most scathing denunciation of the monks 
from a source that cannot possibly be accused of anti-cleri- 
calism. But some allowance must be made for the rivalries 
of different orders. 

In startling contrast to that of the degenerate monks is 
the way of life of the friars. They ask the Lady Poverty 
to a meal. “But she said unto them: ‘Show me first your 
Oratory, the cloister and chapter house, the refectory, 
kitchen, dormitory, and stables, your fine seats, and polished 
tables, and noble houses. For I see none of these things.’ ” 
To wash their hands they could only provide a broken vessel] 
of water, for towel one of the brothers had to offer his habit. 
The table was spread—two or three crusts of barley bread— 
upon the grass. 

The lady marvelled exceedingly and delightedly ex- 
claimed: ‘‘Who ever saw the like in the generations of old.” 
When asked for cooked food the brothers could only bring 
a basin of water in which to dip the bread. For savoury 
herbs from the garden no better substitute could be found 


“This work is conveniently accessible in English, published by Mont- 
gomery Carmichael under the title, The Lady Poverty, 1902. 


THE RISE OF THE FRIARS 161 


than bitter wild herbs from the woods. There was no salt 
to season them, nor even a knife to trim them. Wine there 
was none. When the Lady Poverty was weary she was 
obliged to rest upon the bare ground with only a stone for a 
pillow. 

“So after she had slept for a brief space in peace she 
arose and asked the brothers to show her their cloister. And 
they, leading her to the summit of a hill, showed her the wide 
world, saying: “This is our cloister.’ ” 13 

Batightedly bidding them all sit down, she praised them 
in the very highest terms: “Behold what T longed for I see, 
what I desired I hold, for I am joined to them that are a 
type on earth of Him to whom I am espoused in Heaven. 
* * * IT pray and most earnestly beseech you as most dear 
sons to persevere; * * * not abandoning your perfection as 
is the manner of some. * * * Most high is your perfection, 
above man and the strength of man and it excels in bright- 
ness the perfection of your forefathers.” 

S. Dominic, a Spaniard who enjoyed the confidence of 
Popes, was much more a practical man of affairs than 
S. Francis, though by no means so interesting a figure. In 
many ways he was a great contrast to the Italian, far keener 
about learning but much less sympathetic with nature. In- 
deed on one occasion, in the manner of the old Egyptian 
monks, he saw the devil in a sparrow that was disturbing 
his studies and so he plucked it. alive.*# 

A far happier incident in his life was his famous visit to 
a Franciscan chapter at the Portiuncula, when he was so 
much impressed that he went and knelt before the blessed 
Francis exclaiming, “Truly God hath taken care of these 
saintly little ones and I did not know it. Wherefore I now 
promise to observe holy evangelistic poverty, and I in God’s 
name utter a malediction against all brethren of my order 


PON, \KXI1V, Yeats 
4 Coulton, Five Centuries of Religion, i, p. 179. 


162 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


who in the said order shall presume to have possessions of 
their own.” 


» §. Francis desired that his friars should win men to 
\ Heaven by their example; S. Dominic looked more to preach- 
ing. So keen was he that his disciples should excel in 


this that he became the first monastic legislator to dispense 
them from manual work; at Bologna he even proposed 
(though the Chapter did not agree to it) that all business 
details should be left to the conversi, to whom manual work 
was assigned. S. Benedict’s stability was entirely set aside; 
the friar belonged to the order and must be free to go wher- 
ever his work would count for most. 

The Dominicans did some service to the Church, but to 
civilization none, in the help they gave to Simon de Mont- 
fort the Elder in destroying the Albigensian heresy, which 
Cesarius of Heisterbach *® says had conquered a thousand 
cities and would if left alone have subjugated the whole of 
Europe. 

The friars do not seem to have been primarily respon- 
sible for the methods used—as to which, the less said the 
better. The miserable desolation of Provence must always 
remain a sad blot on the story of the thirteenth century. 

Besides the Franciscans and the Dominicans, there rose 
two other orders, making the four chief divisions of friars. 
Both Carmelites and Augustinians (or Austins) date back 
to earlier times, but are first prominently heard of in the 
thirteenth century. 

The Carmelites are unique in professing an origin far 
antedating the birth of Christianity. They claim continuity 
with the Sons of the Prophets sponsored by Elijah and so 
take their name from Mount Carmel. It is not very easy to 
see why S. Elijah, of all men, should be so much the most 
prominent of the small number of Old Testament saints 
adopted into the Church’s calendar. Many convents of the 


VI, 21. 


THE RISE OF THE FRIARS 163 


Eastern Church bear his name and from his manner of 
leaving the earth he was chosen as the patron saint of the 
flying corps of the Tsarist armies—a capacity in which he 
appears to have been singularly unsuccessful. 

A rule was apparently given to the Carmelites in 1209 by 
Albert, Patriarch of Jerusalem. Not long afterwards they 
left Palestine, on the failure of the Crusades, and settled in 
the West, some travelling in the train of Richard, Earl of 
Cornwall (1241), the only English emperor, or rather king 
of the Romans. 

The Austin friars or hermits, who, like the canons sharing 
the name, follow the rule of S. Augustine (p. 62), were 
formed by the consolidation of a number of small orders, 
united in 1255 by Alexander IV, who also annulled the bull 
of his predecessor which subjected all the mendicant orders 
to episcopal control (p. 27). The brethren of a small, but 
exceedingly vigorous, suborder were known as Sackites from 
the extraordinary simplicity of their attire. 

The Austin vicar-general, Staupitz, under whom Luther 
was a friar, seems almost entirely to have anticipated the 
reformer in his doctrines about justification by faith,1® but 
the order was never specially concerned with scholasticism.1* 

The friars, and particularly the Franciscans, did a very } 
great service to humanity by a wide development of the use 
of lay-helpers. The so-called Tertiaries, or third order— 
the first and second being friars and Frinrondade= raineaeeal in 
the world and gave their spare time to good works. 

In 1395, Boniface VIII permitted them to form regular 
congregations,!® and this is contemplated in a much earlier 

* This important question is very fully discussed by Prof. Késhlin 
(Halle) in his Luther’s Theology. 

7 The Austins and Carmelites are hardly so significant as the Fran- 
ciscans and Dominicans. Workman, in his admirable chapter The Com- 
ing of the Friars, says almost nothing about them, “as they do not il- 
lustrate any new ideas.” LHvolution of the Monastic Ideal, p. 315. 


*%® Manuale Historie ordinis fratrum minorum, by P. Dre H. Holzapfel, 
p. 605. 


164 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


rule of 1221, which is shorter and simpler than that for 
regular friars. It contemplates the Tertiaries’ being either 
clerks or laymen; they must say the seven daily canonical 
hours, and they are bound by severe regulations as to fasting, 
and are restricted from bearing arms.!® 

Sometimes monasteries were founded for the third order. 
At Slane, on a ridge above the Boyne, in county Meath, Ire- 
land, may still be seen the ruins of a convent founded for 
them as late as 1512 by Sir Christopher Fleming, the build- 
_ ings fortified and grouped around a little uncloistered 
court.2° The lay third order is also still maintained. 

For a time the extraordinarily high standard with which 
the friars set out, or at least something near it, was well 
maintained. The bare-footed and extremely devoted Fran- 
ciscans received the warmest welcome in every European 
country to which they turned their steps. Their refusal of 
anything beyond the barest necessities, the simple barn-like 
little chapels in which they prayed, the fervour with which 
they ministered to the poorest of the people, all seemed to 
bring back the purity of Christianity in its very earliest 
days. 

Eecleston *1 gives many particulars of the great eae 
of the first brothers who settled in England, and in London 
on one occasion had to keep a sick brother warm by all lying 
close together as is the manner of pigs. But the original 
idea of their having no homes whatever of their own proved 
impracticable even in the lifetime of S. Francis, and they 
soon built monasteries which were in most respects not very 
different from those of ordinary monks (p. 284). It is not 

® Regula Antiqua Fratrum et Sororum de Paententia, seu Tertu Or- 
dims Sancti Francisci, ed. by Paul Sabatier, from a MS. in the library 
of the convent of Capistran in the Abruzzi. There is doubt as to the 
correctness of the date, 1221. ; 

* The Tertiaries were placed under the Franciscan visitors by Nich- 
olas IV, in 1290. Bull. Unigenitus in Sbaralea, Bull. Franc. IV, p. 167. 


2 Thomas de Eccleston, de Adventu Minorwm in Angliam (in 1224) 
printed in vol. i, Monuwmenta Franciscana, Rolls Series, pp. 5-72. 


THE RISE OF THE FRIARS 165 


easy to see how otherwise they could have trained novices 
and kept their order together at all. 

We have some most inspiring testimonies to the unselfish 
zeal of the friars for righteousness which are all the more 
valuable because to a large extent delightfuly unconscious. 
Matthew Paris ?? relates how, in 1252, the king sent the 
Franciscans some woollen cloth, which they at once returned 
because he had taken it without payment from the merchants. 
A little later he tells us how they contrived to rescue certain 
Jews accused of the murder of a boy at Lincoln “from prison 
and the death which they deserved,” even though it involved 
such unpopularity that the common people withheld their 
accustomed charity.?* 

The Burton annalist, however, attributes this saving of the 
Jews to the Dominicans: “Meanwhile, horrible to relate, the 
friars preachers, who, for love of the Crucified, have chosen 
poverty and professed a strict rule of life that by the ex- 
ample of good works and by the word of life they might save 
- souls about to perish and rescue them from the jaws of hell, 
strove with all their might to save the rest of the Jews who 
were shut up in prison and deserved eternal damnation with 
the devil, seeing that they had no wish or intention to be con- 
verted to the faith of Christ. Hence it is amazing that they 
should attempt to save unbelievers from death, unless they 
wished to be converted and baptized.** 

It certainly shows the friars in a most magnificent light, 
that they should dare to stand up against constituted au- 
thority in an unpopular cause and resist the strongest racial 
and religious prejudices of the mob. 

This splendid zeal for poverty and righteousness was suc- 
ceeded by one of the most remarkable revivals of learning 
that the Middle Ages ever witnessed (p. 217). The friars 


2 Chron. Mai, Rolls Series. V, 275-6. 
1b. V, 546. 
* Annales Monast., Rolls Series, I, pp. 346-7. 


166 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


also carried on a noble missionary work far beyond the 
boundaries of Europe (p. 181). 

Meanwhile the intense difficulty of applying literally the 
strict rules of S. Francis to the conditions of the vastly 
expanding order gave rise to very considerable differences of 
opinion, and gradually two parties were formed, the stricter 
being known as spirituals. Even S. Bonaventura failed to 
find an acceptable compromise, and accordingly a division 
was made. Franciscans were classed as Observants and Non- 
observants. 

By the efforts of S. Bernadine of Siena, the Observantines 
were given a vicar-general of their own, thus definitely divid- 
ing the Franciscan order into Observant and Conventual 
bodies. The Observantines were still divided among them- 
selves; stricter bodies split off—Capuchins in Italy, Récol- 
lets in France, Aleantarines in Spain. 

The relations between the friars and monks were usually 
strained, largely because of the popularity of the former 
with the people, and their aptness to draw unfavourable com- 
parisons between the work done for them by the wealthy 
monks and by the poverty stricken friars. By the time the 
friars arose, the monks had ray done much of their 
best work. 

Not only were pious founders inclined to erect collegiate 
churches instead of further monasteries (see, nevertheless, 
p. 116), but the old houses were beginning to attract fewer 
neophytes. The arrival of the Franciscans in England is 
thus chronicled by one of the monks: “1224. Hodem anno o 
dolor! O plus quam dolor! O pestis truculenta! Fratres 
minores venerunt in Angliam.” ?° 

At first the secular priests, and especially the more earnest 
of them, welcomed the friars who were able to do so much 
to improve the spiritual state of their parishes by their elo- 


* Chron. Petriburg, by John, Abbot of Peterborough, ed. by J. Sparke, 
Hist. Angl., Script. III, p. 102. 


THE RISE OF THE FRIARS 167 


quent preaching and evangelistic piety. S. Francis himself 
had taught by word, and illustrated by example, that friars 
should be very humble toward the clergy: ‘We are sent,” 
he used to say, “to help the clergy for the salvation of souls 
that whatsoever is found lacking in them may be supplied 
by ug!’ 26 

This feeling gradually changed as the friars became rivals 
rather than merely voluntary helpers, and especially when 
they took the fees that should have formed a large part of 
the incomes of the rectors. 

In 1250, Innocent IV permitted the friars to bury in their 
churches and yards anyone who desired it, thus taking a 
most valuable source of income out of the hands of the parish 
priests, who now had nothing to offer that the friars could 
not duplicate, particularly as endowed chantries and Masses 
might be established in the churches of friars.?? 

It was felt that the goodness of the friars would greatly 
assist in their salvation all those found buried in their 
_ churches at the Day of Doom, and sometimes laity were 
actually in pious fraud laid to rest in friars’ gowns. 

Their extreme popularity had caused property to be 
almost forced upon them, and in England the custom of 
the community’s holding it to the use of the friars did much 
to develop the notion of trusteeship. In other countries such 
possessions were frequently vested in the Pope. 

Before very long, in all lands, the friars were ministering 
in magnificent minsters, superior to most parish churches, 
vast in dimensions, brilliant with painted glass, resplendent 


* Speculum Perfectionis, seu 8. Francisci Assisiensis Legenda Anti- 
quissima, auctore Fratre Leone, IV, 54; Ed. by Paul Sabatier, pp. 92-93. 

* Monks, friars, and secular priests are not infrequently found satir- 
ized in the carved details of churches belonging to their rivals. A fox 
dressed as a friar addressing a congregation of geese is to be seen in 
Norwich Cathedral, a Benedictine house. In Ludlow Church, Shropshire, 
which was always parochial, a misericord displays a monk sitting by his 
fire in a large arm-chair. Before him is a kettle on a fire, behind him 
hang two fat pigs. 


168 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


with coloured frescoes, and variegated with the canopied 
tombs of wealthy and high-placed patrons. Brother Elias, 
who even in the lifetime of S. Francis had succeeded to the 
control of the order, erected at Assisi the splendid basilica 
that is one of the finest artistic monuments of Italy. 

The Franciscan church of 8. Croce, in Florence, is one of 
the noblest in the city, equalled only, perhaps, after the 
cathedral, by another friar church, the Dominican 8. Maria 
Novella. Matthew Paris alleges that by the middle of the 
thirteenth century the convents of the friars rivalled the 
palaces of kings.?* There is little in the way of archeological 
evidence to support this view, but plenty to corroborate the 
sneer of Piers Plowman a century later against those who 
wish to put their names on the stained windows of friars’ 
churches: 


And sithen he seyde, 
We have a window in werkynge. 
Woldest thou glaze that gable, 
And grave there thy name, 
Nigher should thy soul be 
Heaven to have. 


The vast Greyfriars Church in London (three hundred by 
eighty feet) with its pillars of marble and magnificent win- 
dows of coloured glass, built by queens, and nobles, and 
wealthy burgesses, was one of the finest buildings in the 
city. In 1461, when the fugitive Henry VI and his adher- 
ents were entertained by the Scots at Edinburgh, the place 
chosen was the Dominican Convent.?® 

Still, whatever faults they may have had, it was a splendid 
revival of monasticism that the friars brought about. They 
were ubiquitous; helping the parish clergy, ministering to 
the very outcasts, or serving as chaplains to kings; filling 


*° Chron. Mai, IV, 280. 
* Hume Brown, History of Scotland, vol. i, p. 251. 


THE RISE OF THE FRIARS 169 


bishops’ sees—sometimes the Papal chair, sent on diplomatic 
missions,®® rallying to Simon de Montfort in support of 
Parliament, patronizing and sometimes practising art, lec- 
turing at the universities (p. 217)—ready for any sort of 
work that wanted men. 

Sometimes, indeed, they are found acting in somewhat 
unexpected capacities. Thus, in 1378, some of the Irish 
Carmelites apparently undertook the duties of a regular 
garrison. In that year, Richard II made a grant in con- 
sideration of the great labour, burden and expense which the 
Priors of the Convent of Leighlin Bridge have and do sus- 
tain in supporting their house, and the bridge contiguous 
thereto, against the king’s enemies.** 

As the duty of guarding the bridge, which was on the high- 
road between Dublin and Kilkenny, is assigned to the Prior, 
it is possible that it was his duty to provide regular soldiers; 
but it appears more probable that military services were 
performed by the Carmelites in person. In any ease, their 
convent in ruin is more like a castle than a priory. 

As the Middle Ages wore on toward their end, the friars 
were doing very much to reassert that ascetic control of the 
world that had been the dominant feature of their first dawn. 
Father Cuthbert claims ** that their vernacular preaching 
did much to promote the national literatures of Europe; the 
monks had done something along the same lines (p. 192), 
but certainly on a far smaller scale. 

There is no doubt that the friars did something to popu- 
larize the church service on what would now be called “mis- 
sion” lines. The Christmas Crib, and simple miracle plays, 
sought to make the events of the Church’s year more real 


* Thus, it was a Franciscan friar who was sent (indirectly) in 1317 
by Pope John XXII to Robert Bruce, whom that sovereign declined to 
see, as he had to confess that his master declined to recognise him as 
king of Scots. There were abundant other instances. 

* Archdall, Monasticon Hibernicum, art. Leighlin. On its suppres- 
sion, the monastery was converted into a fort, regularly garrisoned. 

* Romanticism of St. Francis, p. 180. 


170 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


to the people. Hymn singing in the vernacular was another 
feature of the revival that the friars brought about. As late 
as the time of Shakespeare, popular ditties about them were 
current, one of which is used in the “Taming of the Shrew”: 


It was the friar of orders grey, 
As he forth walked on his way.” 


Despite the fact that the friars had by the time of the 
dissolution accumulated considerable property, it was trifling 
compared with that of the monks. They still lived by beg- 
ging. Chaucer reproaches them not with wealth but with 
the hypocritical character of their mendicancy. But he 
specially says that his own friar was exceptional. 

It is perfectly impossible not to feel that by the mid- 
fourteenth century the friars had lost their original ideals 
to a very great extent. Whatever allowance be made for 
exaggeration by Wyckliffe, Langland, and Chaucer, it is 
impossible merely to brush aside their references to friars. 
In Chaucer’s ‘‘Prologue,”’ as nowhere else at equal length, 
the Middle Ages live again. All the pilgrims fare alike; the 
foibles of lay folk and Church folk are treated with impartial 
hand. . | 

Later on, all four orders were to experience a most splen- 
did revival. Alone of the great medieval orders the friars, 
aid particularly the Franciscans and Dominicans, were to 
take a very leading part in the post-Renaissance revival of 
monasticism. A new sphere of usefulness was opened when 
their churches were made parochial—a common arrangement 
now.** ‘They have carried the Gospel to many lands. They 


> Act IV, Scene I, Petruchio’s fourth speech. 

* At any rate after the dissolution in England friars sometimes held 
parishes. In Lurgashall Church, Sussex, is preserved (in a copy made 
1716) a declaration of the parishioners concerning land for the mainte- 
nance of a clerk dated 1567, containing the sentence: “a Fryer called 
Sr John was parson next after the said Sr Richard.” It is printed in 
Sussex Archeological Collections, LXV, p. 257. 1924. 


THE RISE OF THE FRIARS Dee 


have founded colleges and schools. They have done as much 
as any to interpret Latin Christianity to the masses of today. 


BIBLIOGRAPHY: 


The chief authority for the life of S. Francis of Assisi is 9. 
Francisci Assisiensis Vita et Miracula, Celano, printed in the 
original Latin at Rome, 1906. Ed. E. d’Alengon. 

The Vita Prima was written (1228-1229) for Gregory IX; the 
Vita (Legenda) Secunda in 1248. The English edition is Lives 
of St. Francis of Assisi, by Brother Thomas of Celano, trans. by 
A. G. Ferrers Howell. 

Other sources of the greatest value are: Legenda Trium So- 
ciorum, 1246, ed. Faloci-Pulignani (Foligno, 1898). Trans. into 
English by E. G. Salter, 1902. 

Speculum Perfectionis, by Brother Leo, ed. by its discoverer, 
P. Sabatier, in 1898. English translation, The Mirror of Per- 
fection, 1899, trans. by S. Evans. 

Sacrum Commercium. Published as The Lady Poverty in 
English, ed. by Montgomery Carmichael, 1902. 

Legende Duae (Maior et Minor) of Bonaventura, de Vita S. 
Francisct, ed. by Franciscans of Quaracchi. 

Floretum, Italian Fiorettv. Eng. trans. T. W. Arnold. Little 
Flowers, 1898. De Adventu FF Minorum in Angliam, by Thomas 
de Eccleston, and the Epistole Fratris Adae de Marisco de Ordine 
Minorum are printed with other documents in Monumenta Fran- 
ciscana, Rolls Series, ed. J. S. Brewer. 

There are other documents, including the Rule and the Grey 
Friars Chronicle in English, in vol. II, also R.S. Ed. Richard 
Howlett. 

Eccleston is translated in The Friars and how they came to 
England; introduction by Fr. Cuthbert, London, 1903. 

Regula Antiqua Fratrum et Sororum de Paenitentia seu Tertir 
Ordinis Sancti Francisci, Ed. Sabatier, 1901. 

Some of the best of the extremely numerous secondary writings 
are A. G. Little, Studies in English Franciscan History, Man- 
chester University, 1917. 

Mrs. Oliphant, Francis of Assist. 

A. Jessopp, The Coming of the Friars. 

P. Sabatier, St. Francis, Eng. trans. L. S. Houghton. 

Fr. Cuthbert, Life of St. Francis, and Romanticism of St. 
Francis. 

St. Francis of Assisi and his Legend, by Nino Tamassia, trans. 
by L. Ragg, is of great interest, concerning the general subject 
of the lives of the saints. 

For S. Dominic, the chief source is the Record by Jordan .of 


172 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM . 


Saxony, ed. J. J. Berthier, Freiburg, 1891. The Bollandists, 
A.SS. Aug. 4th 359, seq., give a life in their well known series. 
Bede Jarrett, O. P. The Life of St. Dominic (1170-1221). 
The great interest taken in the Franciscans appears rather to 
have caused the Dominicans to’be neglected by English scholars. 
Medieval England. Ed. by H. W. G. Davis (Oxford Univ., 1924) 
ch. X, pp. 344-427. Monks, Friars and Secular Clergy is a val- 
uable study of relations. 


SS 


CHAPTER XI 
THE MONK AS MISSIONARY 


It was not to be expected even in the earliest days that 
monastic enthusiasm would long remain contented in the 
actual cloister. The great world beckoned, heathenism chal- 
lenged, and one of the first duties that monks took upon 
themselves was that of spreading the faith. It was chiefly 
from their lips that those who dwelt beyond the empire’s 
bounds heard the Gospel in many regions of the world, from 
Scotland to Cathay. 

Among the earliest, and in some respects the most remark- 
able, of these noble missionary labours was that which ecar- 
ried the faith, though in its Nestorian form, from the shores 
of the Mediterranean to those of the far distant Pacific. 

More than twelve hundred years have passed away since 
a few poor monks began that task of evangelizing China, 
which even today makes but slow progress despite the earnest 
efforts of so many relatively wealthy missions, and the 
devoted lives of multitudes of well taught workers. In view 
of present day efforts to Christianize the Far East, the 
extremely successful monastic methods of dealing with the 
same problem before Alfred the Great was born, have an 
exceedingly special interest. 

The spiritual followers of Nestorius, who clung to his 
teachings after their condemnation by the Council of Ephesus 
in 431, were largely of Syrian:race. Nobly turning toward 
the rising sun, instead of disturbing the Roman Empire 
with further religious controversies on that particular point, 
the Syrian monks carried on a glorious missionary work, 

173 


174 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


which covered Asia with their bishoprics from Jerusalem to 
Peking, and from southern India to Turkestan. At the 
height of their prosperity they seem to have had no less than 
twenty-five metropolitan bishops under the Catholics or 
Patriarch, whose seat was at Seleucia-Ctesiphon, close to 
Baghdad. The monks who ‘observing the course of the 
winds made their way to China through difficulties and 
perils,” ? must have been cheered by arriving at monasteries 
occupied by their brethren at the end of every few days’ 
march. Layard saw a number of curious bowls from China 
in an ancient Nestorian church in a valley of Kurdistan, an 
interesting evidence of the former Asia-wide extent of a 
communion that has now only a few thousand members. 

Most of our real knowledge of these missionaries in the 
Far East is derived from the now famous tablet at Si-ngan-fu 
which the Jesuits discovered in 1625, and which bears a date 
corresponding to 781 a.p. The genuineness of the monument 
was at one time a matter of great interest in Europe and 
was discussed by Voltaire and Renan. It admits of no 
serious dispute. 

In all the long story of Christian missions, there is per- 
haps no single document that can compare with this one for 
interest, giving us an excellent idea of Nestorian methods © 
of propaganda. As to the extent of their success, there is 
little evidence beyond the fact that in the T’ang capital 
(Si-ngan-fu) they had at one time about sixty clergy. With 
many vicissitudes their Church lasted till in the thirteenth 
century the Franciscans began to arrive, but it appears not 
seriously to have survived the downfall of Mongol power in 
1368, when the native Ming dynasty was established. 

The first part of the tablet sets forth the main truths of 
the Christian faith, asserting that the Wise Men came from 


1A very good map of the metropolitan bishoprics of the Nestorian 
church is given in Colonel Yule’s Cathay and the Way Thither, vol. iii, 
p. 23, last ed. Khanbalik (Peking) and Sin are in China. 

? Expression used on the Nestorian Tablet. 


THE MONK AS MISSIONARY 175 


Persia. It is remarkable that the Christian message is 
presented in language and in terms entirely familar to the 
Chinese. The writer was himself a Chinese, Ching-ching, 
evidently an excellent scholar. All three religions are 
conciliated. 

The Jewish Prophets are called “sages”; the first man is 
said to have had bestowed upon him an excellent disposition 
superior to all others, exactly in the Confucian way; the 
Scriptures are called sutras, like the Buddhist sacred works. 
The Christian Way is emphasized in terms most familiar to 
the Taoists. Many other Chinese religious expressions are 
adopted; the whole inscription would be readily understood 
by any educated Chinese. 

The noblest part of the Christian social message, espe- 
cially as it was seen by the monks, is very well set forth. 
Christians “keep neither male nor female slaves. Putting 
all men on an equality they make no distinction between the 
noble and the mean. They neither accumulate property nor 
wealth; but giving away all they possess, they set a good 
example to others. They observe fasting in order that they 
may subdue ‘the knowledge’. Seven times a day they meet 
for worship and praise and earnestly they offer prayers for 
the living and the dead (presumably this is in connexion with 
ancestor worship). Once in seven days they have a sacrifice 
without the animal.” 

The first monk to arrive (Alopen), in 635 a.p., hastened 
to get imperial support, and Chéng Kuan of the T’ang 
dynasty gave by imperial rescript a somewhat guarded sup- 
port to the faith, ending: “This teaching is helpful to all 
creatures and beneficial to all men. So let it have free 
course throughout the empire.” * In gratitude, a faithful 
portrait of the Emperor was placed upon the walls of the 
monastery: “The celestial beauty appeared in its variegated 
colours.” 

*This edict has been identified among the dynastic records. 


176 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


In every respect it is clear that monasteries were built in 
purely Chinese style, and they must outwardly have resem- 
bled the Buddhist ones. “The corridors and walls were nobly 
ornamented and beautifully decorated; roofs and flying eaves 
with coloured tiles appeared like the five-coloured pheasant 
on the wing.” From the imperial rescript it is clear that 
the first missionaries brought images, for the days of icono- 
clasm in the Byzantine Empire had not yet come. 

The Nestorians possessed a great advantage over modern 
missionaries in being able to say what they liked about 
Christendom; it was not represented by samples at treaty 
ports. In describing the condition of Syria it must be ad- 
mitted they had in mind far more the need for impressing 
the Chinese than of setting forth strict truth. 

“The country produces asbestos cloth, the soul-restoring 
incense, the bright-moon pearls, and night-shining gems. 

“Robberies and thefts are unknown among the common 
people, while everyone enjoys happiness and peace. None 
but the luminous teachings prevail; none but virtuous rulers 
are raised to the sovereign power. The territory is of vast 
extent; and its refined laws and institutions as well as 
accomplished manners and customs are gloriously brilliant.” 

In point of fact, Syria had for a century and a half been 
under Moslem rule and some of the other statements might 
be hard to verify. At the end is given the name of a patri- 
arch (of Seleucia-Ctesiphon), who had really been dead 
several months. 

It seems probable that the persecution of all foreign creeds 
which broke out in 845 was fatal to Nestorianism in China, 
but it was reintroduced from the conversion of two tribes of 
Turkish origin, the Keraits and the Onguts, who were later 
connected with the Mongols.* 


‘There exists a letter of 1007 from the Bishop of Merv to the Patri- 
arch, reporting the conversion of the Keraits and asking for concessions ~ 


about their fasting. 


THE MONK AS MISSIONARY 177 


Thus on the establishment of the Mongol dynasty, Nes- 
torian Christianity got a new foothold in the empire. At 
Fang Shan, a few miles southwest of Peking, there is a 
Buddhist “Temple of the character Ten” (in Chinese +-) 
which contains some old Christian monuments and was un- 
doubtedly Nestorian originally. Other remains have been 
found. 

These first Christian missionaries represented no alien 
culture, but could speak to the Chinese in terms that they 
perfectly understood. They appear to have done more than 
our modern missionaries have so far been able to accomplish 
in the way of direct conversion—not otherwise. On the 
other hand, it does not appear that Nestorian Christianity 
really exerted any traceable influence on the stream of Chi- 
nese civilization.® 

It was likewise by monastic preaching that virtually all 
Northern Europe was converted to the faith. It certainly 
does not seem that the monks deliberately planned by their 
wide-spreading missions to bring about the much needed 
stabilization of Europe after the fall of Rome, they rather 
went forward step by step as they saw the will of God, not 
specially concerned as to the ultimate result of their labours; 
yet this was by far the most important eventual outcome of 
all the work they did. 

To the rude and warlike Northern children—for as such 
they are depicted in the entrancing Icelandic sagas, the 
whole race of them more like college freshmen than men 
of mature years—Christianity meant far more immediately 
a sharing of the culture of the South than any very con- 
spicuous improvement in their morals. This is very evident 
in the history of the Franks by Gregory of Tours. 

5T am much indebted both to the lectures and personal conversation 
of Prof. Paul Pelliot, of the Collége de France, who has made some most 
interesting discoveries about the Nestorians, collecting materials for a 


much fuller account than any that has yet been written. His volumes 
will be welcomed by scholars. 


178 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


The legions of Rome had failed at length to guard the 
imperial frontiers or to set any bounds to the ravages of 
barbarians swarming over land and sea. ‘The Christian 
monk succeeded not only in keeping the Northern races in 
the Northern lands, but by adding those territories to Chris- 
tendom, he both relieved the southlands of that special 
danger and gave Western Europe a real unity that endured 
for almost an entire millennium. 

The South gave a common Latin tongue and a common 
cultural tradition that reached into the Arctic Circle; the 
North contributed a common architecture whose glory has 
never been surpassed and whose magnificent Gothic min- 
sters, enriched by endless variety, and yet in most features 
essentially the same, still rise from the Norwegian fjords to 
the Sicilian hills, and from the furthest limits of Portugal 
to countries far east of the Vistula. 

In employing monks as their missionaries, and founding 
monasteries as their mission stations, besides addressing 
themselves in the first place to kings, both the Celtic and 
the Latin Churches agreed ; in other things for the most part 
they differed. An Irish monastery in a pagan land, as in 
Ireland itself, was set down far from the abodes of man, in 
surroundings that suggested, in some degree at least, the 
deserts where monasticism itself was born. Such were 
the places beloved by SS. Columba and Aidan, and Cuth- 
bert. Jona and Lindisfarne, lonely, rocky, wave-beaten 
islands, Melrose beside a river well inland, all distant 
from cities and marts, are typical Ivish missions. It is a 
beautiful story of simple devotion, deep sympathy for beasts 
and love of nature’s own solitudes that Adaman has to 
tell in his famous “Life of Columba.” ® and in later years 


*That the Irish monks were more appreciative of nature than the 
Latin will hardly be denied; yet it is noteworthy that no Celtic record 
even mentions the now famous Fingal’s cave in Staffa, close though it is 
to Iona. 


THE MONK AS MISSIONARY 179 


Gall 7 and Columbanus among the mountains of Switzerland 
represented the untiring devotion of the Celts. They did 
not seek big towns. 

The Latins represented a different tradition and a greater 
one, maybe. Theirs was the accumulated wisdom and the 
imperial tradition of Rome. Bede tells us how in sending 
S. Augustine to Ethelbert of Kent, Pope Gregory sought to 
impress the Saxons by such an feet as one sovereign 
might send to another. 

The Latin monks, whatever their race, and many were 
of barbarian stock, set up their seats in the largest towns 
there were—S. Augustine in Canterbury, striving also to 
occupy Rochester, London, and York; 8. Boniface at Mainz 
upon the busy Rhine; 8. Willibrod at Frisian Utrecht; 
S. Ansgar, the apostle of the North, at Charles’ stronghold 
of Hamburg; Boro among the Wends; and Adelbert at 
Prague, all sought the biggest cities or the best strategic 
points. 

It is of extraordinary interest to find that (unlike the 
Nestorians in China), S. Boniface in his very uphill work 
of bringing Christianity to the German lands has to com- 
plain in a letter to the Pope that his German, Bavarian, 
and Frankish converts were scandalized by travellers’ 
reports of what went on under the very shadow of 
S. Peter’s at Rome. Pope Zachary (under date of April 1, 
743), could only reply that he was outraged too, but 
that all his efforts to bring about an improvement had so far 
failed.® 


™The Abbey of S. Gall afterwards became famed throughout Europe 
for its singing and also for its copying of MSS. (See p. 225.) 

®See the correspondence quoted in Maitland’s Dark Ages, No. IX, pp. 
154-5. Unfortunately the barbarians did not draw the inference of 
Boccaccio’s Jewish convert, that a faith that could continue to exist with 
such appalling scandals at its very heart must indeed be divine. His 
tale is plagiarised in Luther’s Table Talk (Sec. DCCCLXIX, W. Haz- 
litt’s ed., p. 353) where the incident is said to have happened at Wit- 
tenberg and in the reformer’s own experience. 


\ 
4 


180 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


As with missionaries in many other lands and centuries, 
the monks were building for posterity very well, but for 
their own generation the results were by no means what 
might have been hoped for. The newly Christianized people 
were apt to throw off their old barbarian codes of morality 
and honour without being very seriously influenced by the 
ethics of their new faith. 

A terrible example among the Franks is the well-known 
story of the revolt of the nuns at Poitiers shortly after the 
death of S. Radegund (587). With the help of “murderers, 
adulterers, law-breakers, and other scoundrels” the furious 
women broke all bounds, committed disgraceful excesses and 
routed completely the bishops and clergy who desired to 
restore order. Fighting went on in the very church and 
the trouble lasted for two years.® In the days of early 
mission work, Christianity would seem to have done very 
much more for architecture and political organization than 
for actual morals. 

As the generations wore on, improvement was steady 
and perhaps even rapid. The Christianization of Europe 
was never quite completed; the Lapps are mostly pagan 
yet. But of all northern Christendom—practically every 
church beyond the empire’s ancient bounds—the monk 
could feel that it was his own work. Without the devoted 
labours of the ascetics, the barbarians must have remained 
for further centuries outside the pale. The position of 
~ the monk at the dawn of the Middle Ages is very well ex- 
pressed by Henry Osborn Taylor: ‘Many bishops and priests 
were little better than the nobles, yet the Church preserved 
Christian belief and did something to preserve morality. 

“Everywhere the monk was the most striking object lesson, 
with his austerities, his terror-stricken sense of sinfulness 
and conviction of the peril of the world. No material, grasp- 
ing bishop, no dissolute and treacherous priest denied that 

° Gregory of Tours, History of the Franks, bk. IX, chh. 39-44. 


THE MONK AS MISSIONARY 181 


the monk’s was the ideal Christian life; and the laity stood 
in awe, or expectation, of the wonder-working power of his 
asceticism.” 1° 

Missionary zeal, in fact, seems to be inherent in the very 
essence of monasticism, for from their very foundation in 
the thirteenth century, the friars found their way out to 
China; the Jesuits in the sixteenth to Japan. Both sup- 
plied many pioneers for the exploration and settlement of 
the Americas. 

S. Francis himself, travelling to the East with the Cru- 
saders, preached to an Egyptian army with the sultan at 
its head, though he knew no syllable of the Arabic tongue. 
Success in such conditions was hardly to be hoped for, 
though it speaks something for the chivalry of that day that 
such a thing was permitted at all. 

The scene must have been picturesque, but we know little 
more than the fact. Probably the great difference in the 
whole cultural background between the two civilizations pre- 
vented the personality of 8. Francis from being specially 
impressive to the Moslems. In the “Speculum Perfec- 
tionis” 14 we read how he taught the brethren to travel with 
humility and devotion to the furthest portions of the world. 
God has chosen them to look after the souls both of the 
faithful and the heathen. 

From the first, the Franciscans were a missionary order. 
It would undoubtedly have delighted the soul of S. Francis 
could he have seen his children carrying the Gospel to the 
furthest recesses of the American wildernesses. It was they 
who, when in the late eighteenth century the Russians pene- 
trating southward from Alaska caused somewhat needless 
alarm to the Spanish rulers of Mexico, under Junipero Serra 
carried HI Camino Real through the California hills, along 
the shore. Beside it, at convenient intervals, they strung 


Medieval Mind, vol. i, p. 195. 
“IV, 65, pp. 118-122, Sabatier’s edition. 


2. 


182 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


those picturesque old missions that impart to that delightful 
country something of the atmosphere of Southern Europe. 

One of them, close by the Golden Gate, has given the name 
of San Francisco himself to the metropolis of the West; 
while its rival, Los Angeles, takes its name from another 
mission. Others have given names to pleasant, palm-shaded 
sea-side towns. White men now worship where once the 
Indians prayed. 

The Mongol conquests, extending into Europe and in- 
cluding China under the great Emperor Kublai Khan (well 
known from Coleridge’s poem), opened a secure way to the 
Far East along which travelled some of the early Fran- 
ciscans, such as John of Montecorvino, made Archbishop of 
Peking,?” Friar Odoric of Venice, and many more. 

Those were the days when Marco Polo gave Europe its 
first real knowledge of China and, though they are far less 
known, some of the friars, particularly Odoric, supply in- 
formation of little less importance. Odoric refers to the 
Nestorians as “Christians indeed, but schismatics and here- 
tics.” +8 Marco Polo is less unsympathetic in his references. 

Some two centuries later, the Portuguese conquests in 
the East, following in the wake of Vasco da Gama, who 
doubled the Cape in 1498 and found a new route to India, 
opened new communications with all the far Oriental lands. 
S. Francis Xavier (1506-1552), one of the original mem- 
bers of the Society of Jesus (p. 251) had a most remarkable 
career as a missionary, travelling about in the true spirit 
of his Basque race, over all the wide areas between Goa and 
Japan. 

He inaugurated Jesuit methods of propaganda, wholesale 
Baptism, and very tolerant recognition of ancient customs 

* Where he arrived about 1295. He became Archbishop in 1307, and 
is said to have had seven suffragans. His most notable convert was 
Prince George, mentioned by Marco Polo, formerly Nestorian. Kublai’s . 


mother was a Kerait princess, a Nestorian Christian. 
“Travels of Friar Odoric, sec. 6. 


THE MONK AS MISSIONARY 183 


not entirely inconsistent with Christianity, in the hope of 
providing for the future of the Church by bringing up 
children in the faith. 

To him belongs the credit of having realized before any- 
one else, at least to some extent, those peculiar qualities of 
the Japanese which have given them in their intercourse 
with Europeans so very different a fate from that of all other 
Asiatics. His letters from their country contain many 
references to the keen anxiety of the people to learn, in 
contrast to the comparative listlessness of other Oriental folk. 

The missionaries were eventually expelled from the em- 
pire by the founder of the Tokugawa line of Shoguns. The 
Japanese view is given by Count Okuma: ‘Although the 
object of the pioneer of the mission, Xavier, was to preach 
the Gospel, that of those who followed him was by no means 
to spread the doctrine of Christianity, but to absorb our 
country by a series of most treacherous intrigues.” “If the 
Portuguese ministers had confined their energy to religious 

enterprises only, Japan would easily have been transformed 
into a Christian country.” 

But that the Jesuits planted the seeds of Christianity 
very deep is evident from the fact that when in the nine- 
teenth century Japan was opened up to intercourse with the 
world by the expedition of Commodore Perry (1852-4), it 
was found that many families had in secret preserved their 
faith all through the long seclusion of the land—two hun- 
dred and fifty years. 

This is one of many romances connected with the story 
of the early Jesuit missionaries, both in East and West. 
One Constantino Beschi contrived to get high in the favour 
of a native Indian prince, and he used to travel about his 
dominions in all the pomp and circumstance of a high Asiatic 
grandee, while many of his colleagues, no worse men than 
himself, in their own opinion or his, were ministering to 
wretched outcasts who got ruthlessly driven from the path 


184 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


by his numerous attendants whenever the great man was 
pleased to pass along that way. 

In China, Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) inaugurated a strik- 
ingly successful policy of using Western knowledge of as- 
tronomy, architecture, artillery, and clocks so to impress the 
emperors as to make the missionaries virtually indispens- 
able.*4 

Nor did the Jesuits show any narrow spirit of mere par- 
tisanship when the empire was convulsed by strife. Amid 
the wars of the early seventeenth century by which the 
Manchu Tatars eventually overthrew the native Mings, the 
Jesuits gave help to both, and yet contrived to be in the 
confidence of the Manchus. Schall, Verbiest, and others 
held high office under the vigorous and most capable Kanghi. 

The Jesuits delighted the unsophisticated Manchu rulers 
by their scientific knowledge, by building a palace in the 
style of the Renaissance, and by making those ornate astro- 
nomical instruments that the Germans appropriated during 
the Boxer disturbances. 

Unfortunately neither their common traditions in monas- 
ticism nor even their allegiance to the See of Rome were 
sufficient to keep friars and clerks regular in harmony. The 
Jesuits got into most unhappy disputes with the more un- 
yielding Franciscans and Dominicans, who strongly disap- 
proved of the large concessions made to Chinese ideas in the 
matter of ancestor worship and other Confucian traditions. 
Long and somewhat acrimonious disputes—during which 
successive Popes tried to get at the truth, and Chinese sov- 
ereigns were called in by the Jesuits to decide problems of 
Christian theology—led eventually to utter disaster for the 
mission. 

In the Western hemisphere, as in the East, Jesuit mis- 
“sionaries were to play a most important part. The first 


“By this time it seems likely that both Nestorian and Franciscan 
missions had quite died out. 


THE MONK AS MISSIONARY 185 


wide explorers of the American continents had been laymen 
—the renowned conquistadores of Spain, such as Cortes, 
Pizarro, Valdivia, and De Soto, or vigorous French pioneers 
such as La Salle.*® But it was largely by the Jesuit mis- 
sionaries, both in North and South, that more detailed 
knowledge was secured. 

Thus, by Fr. Kuno, a Spanish Jesuit, was discovered, 
amid the colourful deserts of Arizona, the wonderful ruins 
of Casa Grande, and by him was begun the quaint old church 
of San Xavier del Bac (near Tucson), whose very archi- 
tecture with its pagan looking detail and Indian statues illus- 
trates the Jesuit desire to be all things to all races. By 
French Jesuits the upper lakes were mapped, and the Mis- 
sissippi was explored, tracing out that great French empire 
based on Louisiana and Canada that was never to come to 
birth. But men of another speech still honour Joliet and 
Marquette. 

A peculiarly interesting result of the Jesuit missions was 
_ the setting up in the heart of South America of a remark- 
able monk-ruled state, the fourth that Christendom founded 
—not counting as separate realms the. successive dominions 
of the military orders (p. 201). In Paraguay, extending 
over a very much larger area than belongs to the present 
republic of that name, they founded a vast Indian reserva- 
tion where on fertile river flats the aborigines were pre- 
served from that debilitating contact with the Spaniards 
that had so immensely reduced their numbers in other parts 
of the continents and islands. 

The Jesuits were first called in to care for that territory 
by a Dominican friar who had recently been made a bishop in 
those parts about the year 1586. The fathers did a splendid 
work in protecting the Indians from the rapacity of the 


* This man got into trouble and lost his French estates on account of 
his connexion with the Jesuits. He had a brother among the Sulpicians, 
but he does not appear to have joined any order, though this is not 
impossible. 


186 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


Spaniards, but the state they organized was a paternal abso- 
lutism, controlled by the distant General in Rome and 
owning but a nominal allegiance to the Spanish king. It 
was probably the best that circumstances allowed, but there 
was much trouble both with bishops and governors of 
Asuncion. 

The order must have derived large profits from the planta- 
tion, but the Indians were undoubtedly better off than their 
brethren exploited by the Spanish settlers. A treaty between 
Portugal and Spain, in 1750, which divided Paraguay, was 
the beginning of the end of the state. The Indians had 
not been consulted, the Jesuits objected to the partition, and 
there was fighting for some months. 

In the very interesting old walled city of Carthagena, 
upon the Spanish Main, there stands a double-towered Classic 
cathedral of a common Spanish type. It contains the relics 
of a Jesuit saint, Peter Claver (1581-1654), who through 
many years worked among the slaves that in huge numbers 
were shipped to the place, caring nothing for the unpopu- 
larity that it brought him from the wealth and fashion of 
the town. 

He went out to the ships bringing negroes from Africa 
in the pilot boats and is said to have baptized no less than 
three hundred thousand of those whose slave for ever he 
declared himself to be. 

» Thus, it was mainly by members of religious orders that 
the bounds of Christendom were extended in both ancient 
and recent times. Indeed, from the Council of Chalcedon 
to well into the eighteenth century, they had something ap- 
proaching a monopoly in the noble work. Nestorian, Bene- 
dictine, Franciscan, Jesuit, each in turn, each in his own 
way. 

It is monks who inaugurate the story of the English as 
told in the deathless pages of Venerable Bede. And a 
thousand years later, members of orders then unformed gave 


THE MONK AS MISSIONARY 187 


to America memories of a not dissimilar kind. A railroad 
and many cities, besides countless little whitewashed 
churches, still keep alive their honoured memories from the 
coral reefs of Florida to the poppy-strewn hills of California 
and northward to where the eternal forests of Michigan dip 
into the waters of the lakes. 


BIBLIOGRAPHY: 


There is an excellent account of the earliest Christian mission 
among the Chinese in The Nestorian Monument in China, by 
_ Prof. P. Y. Saeki, a Japanese scholar. The inscription is given 
both in the original and in English. 

Col. Yule’s Cathay and the Way Thither, 2 vols., gives ac- 
counts of the Nestorians, early Franciscans and others, with 
translations of most of the original sources. The second edition 
in 4 vols., brought up to date and revised by Henri Cordier, is a 
great improvement. 

Among the most interesting sources for the conversion of 
Northern Europe are the Icelandic sagas, particularly the Story of 
Olaf in the Heimskringla by Snorri Sturleson. 

A general account will be found in Hope, Conversion of the 
Teutonic Races. 

For later missions, Jesuit Relations, ed. by Prof. Thwaites, 73 
vols. More briefly Parkman, Jesuits in North America, and Pio- 
neers of France. 

See also works under Chapter xvii. 

_ Bancroft’s History of the United States deals with the subject 
in part. 


CHAPTER XII 
THE MONK AS STATESMAN 


The monastically moulded culture of the Middle Ages 
was perhaps one of the most democratic that the world ever 
knew in the sense that an extremely large proportion of the 
‘population felt that they had in it some genuine share. 

The wonderfully high civilization of ancient Greece was 
always upon a foundation of slavery, and this was the case 
even more with the empire of Rome. The culture that was 
inaugurated by the Renaissance was shared by a relatively 
small portion of the general community, especially during 
the eighteenth century, when, perhaps, from the purely in- 
tellectual point of view, it reached its most splendid climax. 

But during the Middle Ages architecture was a communal 
art and the names of individual designers are usually all 
unknown. It required the codperation of all classes to raise 
from medieval poverty cathedrals and churches that for 
beauty and size have but seldom been approached with all 
the wealth and material resources of modern times. There 
is a democratic atmosphere of camaraderie among all classes 
—from the plough-man up to the knight among the pil- 
grims who journeyed with Chaucer to Canterbury—that in 
Europe could hardly be paralleled today. 

It certainly is not true that in the Middle Ages social 
conditions were satisfactory, nor that the poor were not ex- 
ploited and oppressed on the manor, nor that the average 
person was morally better or materially happier than at the 
present time, but the difference in the actual standards of 

188 


THE MONK AS STATESMAN 189 


living was less than today* and in the carrying out of 
public works and particularly the building of churches there 
were elements of a real democracy. 

In no respect is the contribution of the religious orders 
to modern life more striking than in what they did for the 
development of democratic administration, and yet evidence 
is almost wholly circumstantial. It is not a point upon 
which medizval writers display any interest whatever. 

S. Basil had feared, and definitely provided against, a 
democratic state of affairs in his convents (p. 44). In the 
East it is certainly true that whatever popular control of 
the policy of monasticism the monks may have won has 
been of very little significance to the outside world. Nor 
has it been at all considerable in itself. 

That the Greeks were the inventors of democracy is evi- 
denced by the very word itself, but after the days of Alexan- 
der its flame had burned somewhat murkily, and there is not 
much evidence that popular control was ever a very vital 
tradition of the Eastern Church. It is remarkable that 
Procopius, writing about 550 a.p., speaks of the Sklabenoi 
or Slavs as “not ruled by one man but dwelling from of old 
in a state of democracy.” ? But the race has never since, 
at least not until the nineteenth century, shown any very 
democratic tendencies either in secular or ecclesiastical 
affairs. 

The first commonwealth ever to be controlled by Christian 
monks was that of Mount Athos and it has outlasted the, 
historically, far more significant instances that were to rise 
in Western Europe (p. 53). It never had any lay sub- 
jects and in fact all women and even female animals are 
excluded from the holy mountain. The rocky peninsula 
forms a monastic republic, in whose assembly each of the 


+ Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations has some interesting observa- 
tions on this point and much that he says will stand the test of modern 
research. 

2 De Bello Gotthico, III, 14. 


190 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


twenty convents is represented, but the state is not of great 
interest in general history (p. 201). 

In Western Europe it will hardly be questioned that the 
parliaments of nations owe something to the chapters of the 
monks. How much it is most difficult to say. 

The rule of S. Benedict provides that the abbot must do 
nothing of moment without calling together the chapter of 
his monks; ‘fas often as anything special is to be done in 
the monastery, the abbot shall call together the whole con- 
gregation, and shall himself explain the question at issue.” 
But the abbot, having pondered the advice given, and remem- 
bering that it is often to a younger person that God. reveals 
what is best, must himself decide. 

This leaves the abbot in complete control of the situation, 
indeed, but it makes him much less of an autocrat than an 
early feudal king, who was not absolutely obliged to consult 
his council on all occasions, however politic he may have 
found'it to do so. It is inconceivable that under such a 
rule the abbot should have been usually an autocrat. 

In course of time the monasteries became great land- 
owners and this in Europe has for centuries involved large 
responsibilities for local government. In Britain the tradi- 
tion even yet is strong, though of course a waning force. 
Inevitably the abbots found themselves compelled to take 
their part in the feudal system. They were impelled to take 
their share in county activities as local magnates, just like 
other land-owners. They had their own manorial courts; 
they sat in the shiremoot. 

Their education was apt to be better, often much 
better, than that of the lay barons; their usefulness was 
extended accordingly. The king called them to the great 
council of the realm; in England eventually twenty- 
nine of them had seats in the House of Lords. So they 
had to acquire London residences, and, with less reason, 
they frequently had others in provincial centres. At 


THE MONK AS STATESMAN 191 


Exeter, for example, in the Close may still be seen the city 
houses of three great country abbots. The town house of 
the abbots of Cluny is the seat of a well known museum in 
Paris. At the abbeys themselves S. Benedict’s provision in 
the Rule that the abbot should have his meals in the guesten 
hall, and if guests failed might thither summon such of the 
cloister monks as he pleased, was extended into giving the 
abbot a house of his own, frequently with separate hall and 
chapel, so that sometimes the monks themselves may have 
known little more of their Father-in-God than when they 
saw him pontificating with all the state of a diocesan bishop 
in the abbey church (p. 180). He had a fixed income from 
the abbey funds with a completely separate establishment in 
the case of a great house. 

Everything, in short, was early tending to make the abbots 
practical men of affairs, feudal lords, statesmen, ambassa- ° 
dors for kings or Popes, rather than simple recluses. The 
Confessor at Westminster founded (or rather refounded) 
the famous abbey close to his own palace—S. Stephen’s, now 
the Houses of Parliament. Scottish kings at Holyrood and 
Dunfermline had palaces forming part of the same block of 
buildings as abbeys. In Spain at the Escurial and for a 
short time at Yuste* there were similar arrangements. 

This may have led to monks being informally consulted 
upon matters of State, though it is not suggested in the old 
Scottish couplet telling how the king used to go to Holyrood: 


Unto the saintly convent with good monks to dine, 
And quaff to organ music the pleasant cloister wine. 


The lord abbot became a great grandee in the world that 
his spiritual ancestors had given up as wholly vile. It 
would not have seemed right to the desert solitaries, but 
the evolution was quite inevitable. The monk was not seek- 


* Whither the emperor, Charles V, retired in his later years. See p. 
135, note, about Dunfermline. 


192 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


ing political power; it was being forced into his hands. A 
most typical abbot, elected not for family connexions nor 
any sort of “pull” but purely from his popularity with the 
monks, a man of humble birth, is described for us in the 
well known “Chronicle” of Jocelin de Brakelond, the original 
for Carlyle’s “Past and Present.” 

“An eloquent man was he, both in French and Latin, 
but intent more on the substance and method of what he 
said than on the style of words. He could read English 
books most admirably, and was wont to preach to the people 
in English, but in the dialect of Norfolk, where he was 
born and bred; and so he caused a pulpit to be set up in 
the church for the ease of the hearers, and for the ornament 
of the church. 

“The abbot seemed also to prefer an active life to one of 
contemplation, and rather commended good officials than good 
monks. He very seldom approved of any one on account of 
his literary acquirements unless he also possessed sufficient 
knowledge of secular matters; and whenever he chanced to 
hear that any prelate had resigned his pastoral care and 
become an anchorite, he did not praise him for it.” 

Abbot Samson, in fact, seems to have lost the true—or at 
least the original—spirit of monasticism entirely. He can- 
not even appreciate it in others. Nothing perhaps could 
better illustrate the fact that a thirteenth century abbot 
had almost ceased to be a real monk, and had become instead 
a practical man of the world, quite as well equipped to bear 
his part in Parliament as any of the lay barons. 

As one studies some of the monks from the original sources 
it is impossible to avoid the feeling that if they were to 
come back to life today many of the old abbots and priors 
would instinctively turn their steps toward Wall Street 
or the Capitol, quite as readily as to the churches. 

The feudalization of the monasteries came at a later time 


than a similar process in the Church herself. Representa- 
\ 


THE MONK AS STATESMAN 193 


tives of the great baronial houses filled most of the sees of 
Christendom during early medizval years, but the abbots 
were usually elected by the monks, and, as these were re- 
eruited from all classes in the community, the religious 
houses appear to have formed a fairly complete democracy 
in a society where politically it was almost or entirely un- 
known. The German chronicler Bernold (1083) tells us 
that he saw in the monasteries counts cooking and margraves 
feeding pigs.* 

The qualities that gain popularity are in all ages very 
much the same and the general atmosphere that Jocelin 
describes at the Abbey of S. Edmund is strangely similar 
to what still exists in the great English public schools. A. 
more democratic state of affairs as between the members of 
the community themselves it would not be easy to find. 
Money confers almost no prestige at all. The son of a 
British nobleman may at Eton have to fag for the son of a 
country rector.® 
_ This democratic tradition of the monks is strongly con- 
firmed by the bitter invective upon them which in the 
eleventh century was addressed to King Robert by Adalbero 
(p. 180) who, from his hill-top bishopric of Laon, looked 
with the utmost disgust on the changes that the regulars were 
making. The only very definite part of his complaint is 
that men of the lowest birth, ignorant, lazy, deformed, peas- 
ants, sailors or shepherds were being raised to the highest 
places in the Church.® 

How far was this democratic tradition in monasticism a 


* Monumenta Germanice historica; (Hanover), V, 439. 

’This is illustrated by the well-known story of how when a boy from 
S. Europe was sent to Harrow it was hoped to give his schoolfellows 
high respect for him by letting it be known that in certain circum- 
stances he might occupy a prominent throne. The only result was that 
almost all the Harrovians took the necessary steps that would enable 
them to boast in the event of the conditions being fulfilled that they 
had kicked a king of Spain. 

* Migne, P.L. 141, Adalberonis Oarmen, col. 773. 


194 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


power in the world at large? It may not be entirely without 
significance that Magna Carta was drawn up in the Abbey of 
S. Edmund. 

Parliament met originally in the palace of the king at 
Westminster, the theory being that the sovereign summoned 
leading men from all portions of the country to consult 
about government and to vote supplies. Among those entitled 
~ to be called were mitred abbots, eventually twenty-nine, 
besides the bishops and the barons. One of the abbots was 
the head of the great house across the street and, presum- — 
ably at his invitation, Parliament soon formed the custom of 
meeting in the Chapter House of Westminster Abbey, which 
continued so to be used after the dissolution, and to this 
day the building is the property of the nation, not, like 

the rest of the shrine, of the Church. 

- It is also to be noted that when Parliament met at Oxford 
or any other provincial town it was usually in a religious 
house. The first regularly constituted Parliament of Scot- 
land met on July 15, 1326, at the Abbey of Cambuskenneth 
by a wind of the Forth near Stirling; later ones met fre-: 
quently in religious houses, particularly Franciscan friaries. 
We read in the reign of Henry VIII of a “Parliament Cham- 
ber near the Friars Preachers.” 

Though no friar ever had a seat in Parliament (as such) 
it is rather to the friars than to the monks that we must go 
for illustrations of representative government. While S. 
Francis was primarily a saint, S. Dominic was a practical 
statesman, and his order was given a remarkably demo- 
cratic constitution, the main elements of which date from 
the Chapter held at Bologna, under 8. Dominic himself in 
1220-1. 

The friars of each local priory elected their own prior 7— 


™Constitution of 1228 as printed in Hhrle-Denifle, Archiv. I, p. 196 
seq., quoted by Ernest Barker, The Dominican Order and Convocation ; 
a study of the growth of representation in the Church during the thir- 
teenth century. 


THE MONK AS STATESMAN 195 


as in the old Benedictine arrangement—but S. Benedict 
had gone no further than this. In the Dominican order each 
province (usually roughly corresponding to some modern 
nation) had a prior elected by a chapter composed of the 
conventual priors and two friars elected by the whole body 
of each priory. The master-general was elected by a General 
Chapter composed of the provincial priors and two friars 
elected by each provincial chapter.® 

Besides these elected officers are assemblies, largely 
elected. All the friars of each individual convent are en- 
titled to seats in its chapter. The provincial chapter consists 
of the priors of all convents within it, the general preachers 
of the province and one representative of the friars from each 
convent. It annually elects a committee of four definctors 
from the most discreet and proper friars and this forms a 
sort of executive body with wide powers extending even, in 
case of need, to the suspension of the provincial prior. 

The General Chapter of the whole order consists of all 
the provincial priors with their soci and the general preach- 
ers of the province in which the General Chapter is held. 
This, again, has an inner circle of definitors. In two suc- 
cessive annual chapters, one definitor is elected by each 
provincial chapter and each has a soctus assigned to him by 
the provincial prior. In the third annual chapter, the 
elective character for the time being disappears and the 
provincial priors ex-officio and by themselves act as definttors. 
Twice in the history of the order (1228 and 1236), the 
capitulum generalissimum met, containing all the provincial 
priors and elected definitors—two appointed by each pro- 
vincial chapter. Modelled to some extent on the organiza- 
tion of earlier orders, particularly the Hospitalers (p. 202), 
and still more the Premonstratensians, but far more intricate 
and more democratic than either, the Dominican order was 


8 Only one representative friar from each of four provinces erected 
since 1221. 


196 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


thus endowed with a very elaborate constitution which" at 
once recalls more secular instruments of government. 

A German scholar has declared that “it is by far the most 
perfect example that the Middle Ages have produced of the 
faculty of monastic corporations for constitution building.” ® 

The Franciscans originally had only the simplest constitu- 
tion. Instead of the master-general at the head of the whole 
order the Rule provides for the election of a general minister 
“by the mynisters provynciallis and the custodies at the 
chapter of Whitsuntide.” *° This body is usually to meet once 
in three years but this may be varied by the general min- 
ister, whom it may replace if he appear not to be sufficient 
and able for the office. Though thus without the representa- 
tive system of the Dominicans, the Franciscans had vigorous 
democratic ideals and their government was later assimilated 
to that of the preaching order. 

It was in the Dominican convent at Oxford that in 1258 
the so-called Mad Parliament ** met which forced upon the 
sorely reluctant king a council of fifteen, and took a some- 
what significant step in limiting royal power. Evidence that 
the Dominican order directly influenced the constitution of 
the British Parliament is purely circumstantial, and it cer- 
tainly cannot be proved, but at the same time it is un- 
doubtedly probable. 

The elder Simon de Montfort was associated with 8. Dom- 
inic in the terribly devastating work of putting down the 
Albigenses, and in 1212 at Pamiers he summoned to a Par- 
liament, bishops, barons, and burgesses. It was his son who 
led the English barons against Henry III, and summoned 
the first Parliament in which the towns of England were 
represented. It is certainly unlikely that he was entirely 
uninfluenced by the precedents set by the friars. 


* Hauck, Kirchengeschichte Deutschlands, IV, 390; quoted by Barker, 
op. cit., p. 18. 

See Monumenta Franciscana, Rolls Spidey BG hy fF 

™ Matthew Paris, Ohron. Mai. IV. 697. R 


THE MONK AS STATESMAN 197 


A monk of Westminster expresses pained surprise that 
the Franciscans should have supported Simon de Montfort 
against king and Pope, not thinking, as would have been 
proper, of the privileges and honours which the Roman 
Church has showered upon them, nor how King Henry (IIT) 
has cared for and watered the little plant of their order. 
The monk is so scandalized that he refers to the friars simply 
as “quidam,”’ and he goes on with a sad lamentation over 
the state of his country beginning: “O Anglia, olim glorv- 
osa.” 1" The “Song of Lewes,” written by a Franciscan, 
shows a very strongly democratie spirit. 

All that we are entitled definitely to assert is that in mon- 
asticism we find important elements of democratic govern- 
ment, and in the Dominican order a well developed repre- 
sentative constitution, antedating anything of the kind that 
is at all well organized in the government of the English 
State; that men closely connected with the genesis of repre- 
sentative parliaments were associated with Dominican friars 
and that monastic chapter houses were very usual places 
in which parliaments met. The Mother of Parliaments may 
well have been a daughter of the chapters of the monks. The 
Dominican order itself may have been influenced by the 
ancient cortes of Spain, but there seems to be nothing to 
prove it. 


BIBLIOGRAPHY: 


A very useful and suggestive little work is Ernest Barker’s 
The Dominican Order and Convocation, urging the point that it 
was the Church which supplied both the idea of representation 
and its rules of procedure. 

The Parliament of Scotland by Robert S. Rait (1924. Univ. of 
Glasgow) points out how at a convention in Brigham (1290) sat 
23 abbots and 10 priors. Different rolls up to 1560 enumerate 
seven more abbots and as many priors. The principle of monas- 
tic representation was so well established that even commendators 
sat till the act of 1640 which excluded all clergy. 


“Flores Historiarwm, 1265, Rolls Series (Ed. Luard), III, 266. 


CHAPTER XIII 
THE MONK AS SOLDIER 


Nowhere in history, perhaps, does the monk appear in a 
more incongruous role than as the restorer of a professional 
soldiery in the days of feudal levies. His desire to win 
back the Holy Sepulchre of Christ from the hands of infi- 
dels was of the noblest and the best, but the eventual results 
of his action were by no means entirely good. 

It was no uncommon thing from their very earliest years 
for monks to take up arms in causes that to them seemed 
right (p. 28). In the winter of 754-5, the Abbot Warnerius 
helped to defend Rome against Astolph and the Lombards.+ 
All through the Middle Ages it was by no means unusual, 
especially on borderlands, for monks to spring to arms in 
some patriot cause. Their failure to assist in the defence of 
Constantinople, in 1453, has never been counted for good. 

The medieval effort to consecrate war was in itself one 
of the greatest triumphs of the monastic ideal. The noviciate 
of the knight was borrowed from the noviciate of the monk. 
Assuming that a thing in its very essence so fundamentally 
beastly as warfare is capable of any consecration, the all 
night watching of the armour before the dimly hghted altar, 
the vow that such arms should till death be wielded to break 
the heathen and uphold the Christ, and the noble conceptions 
of all that Christian chivalry implied, are among the most 
beautiful ideals that the world ever knew. There is hardly 
a greater reproach to our own generation than the fact that, 


4See Milman, Latin Christianity, II, 423. 
198 


THE MONK AS SOLDIER 199 


while warfare is commoner than ever, all chivalry is well- 
nigh past. 

When the success of the First Crusade had set up the 
feudal Christian kingdom of Jerusalem, many of the soldiers 
of the cross went home. But others stayed in the Holy Land. 
Realizing the great insecurity of the weak outpost of their 
faith, a few good knights vowed themselves to fight till death 
for the highest of all earthly aims, to hold the Sepulchre of 
Christ against the Moslem hordes. They took their name 
from the Temple where Christ so often was, on part of whose 
site their barrack-priory stood (1118). 

In 1128 at the Council of Troyes they were formally rec- 
ognized as an order, chiefly by the influence of the great 
S. Bernard (p. 140), the dominating spirit of that gather- 
ing. Accepting the Cistercian rule, they adopted the white 
habit of the order, adding the red cross of Crusaders. 

They were exempted from all other jurisdiction than that 
of the Pope, relieved from paying tithes, and endowed with 
the singular privilege that their churches were unaffected 
by interdicts. Jacques de Vitry describes them as “in turn 
lions of war and lambs at the hearth; rough knights on the 
battlefield, pious monks in the chapel; formidable to the 
enemies of Christ, gentleness itself to His friends.” 

The Grand Master, residing in the mother house at Jerusa- 
lem, ranked in Christendom as a sovereign prince, but the 
order was not destined to hold any political state. Each 
large district covered by the Templars’ organization was 
under the control of a grand prior, and over each local chap- 
ter of knight-monks was set a preceptor. 

Had the weak and unstable little kingdom of Jerusalem 
been entrusted to the order, its life would probably have 
been longer than it was. Divided counsels had much to do 
with the fall of Jerusalem itself in 1187, and then the 
Templars moved their headquarters to Antioch, later to 
Acre. Unsupported by Europe and unable to hold their 


200 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


position in Asia, the Templars made peace with the aostores 
and retreated to the West. 

The failure of the Crusades brought great kapepnleaey 
upon them. Some of their number laid themselves open to 
severe criticism by fighting with the English against the 
Scots in the battle of Falkirk, in 1298, where certainly their 
vows did not call on them to be. 

The tragic end of the order was one of the most disgrace- 
ful episodes of medizeval times. It had gathered encrmous 
riches and held a most dominating position in Europe, when 
Philip the Fair, aided by the weak French Pope, Clement V 
(a former bishop of Bordeaux), trumping up charges 
that never were proved, had all the Templars in France 
arrested (1307), and after proceedings that reflect no 
credit on anyone concerned, the noble order was dissolved 
in 1312. 

Chapter meetings were secret, and at these novices were 
admitted. There is little doubt that less enquiry than in 
the earlier days had sometimes been made into the records 
of recruits. Possibly the great and cultured order had 
learned to appreciate the civilization of its Saracen foes. 
But there is no real doubt that the chief complaint against 
the order was its wealth. What little of this escaped royal 
rapacity was handed over to the Knights of S. John, except 
in Portugal and Spain where crusades were needed at the 
very gates against the Moors. 

In Portugal the name was changed (in 1319) to ““The 
Order of Christ.” In the fifteenth century the Grand Mas- 
ter was the celebrated Prince Henry the Navigator, who, 
from his sea-girt retreat at Sagres near Cape S. Vincent, 
organized with the funds of the order those maritime ex- 
plorations which eventually, after his own death, led to Vasco 
da Gama’s doubling of the Cape. 

Among the earliest results of these voyages was the dis- 
covery of Porto Santo and Madeira. On the former island 


THE MONK AS SOLDIER 201 


for a time was the home of Moniz Perestrello.? His daughter 
was the wife of Christopher Columbus, and it has never 
been doubted that from his father-in-law he got many ideas 
about exploration. His great voyage was unquestionably 
facilitated by those undertaken by the Order of Christ. Thus . 
even in the discovery of America monasticism may claim 
some share. 

The Knights Hospitalers, as their name implies, were 
originally an ambulance unit. They count their founder 
one Gerald (d. 1118), but in some form or another they 
existed before his time. Under Raymond of Provence 
(Grand Master 1120-60), they established a hospital near 
the Church of the Sepulchre, following S. Augustine’s rule 
(p. 62). Gradually they adopted a military organization 
and thus became colleagues, but rivals, of the Templars. 

So great did their prestige become that in 1131, Al- 
phonsus, king of Navarre and Aragon, actually left his 
crown to the military orders, believing that they could hold 
his dominions against the Moors better than any secular 
prince. But the will was set aside. The order, however, 
took part in the Moorish wars in Spain as well as in the 
Holy Land Crusades. 

Meanwhile preceptories and commanderies had _ been 
founded all over Europe. The capture of Jerusalem by 
Saladin, in 1187, was, of course, a very severe blow, but 
yet the most glorious period of the order’s history even in 
the East was still to come. It had become a political power, 
although on a small scale, when Richard Coeur de Lion 
handed over to it Acre, which was held until 1291. 

So for the second time in history we find a monastic power « 
governing as a sovereign state. And, unlike the monk-re- 
public of Mount Athos (p. 53), the Hospitalers were called 


7Its doors are preserved in the Chicago Historical Society’s Rooms, 
in North Dearborn Avenue and Ontario Street. 

?> Murray, New Oxford Dictionary, Hospitaler, says they were founded 
about 1048. 


202 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


upon to rule in their successive territories a considerable 
population of laity. 

On the loss of Acre, a refuge was found in Cyprus by 
invitation of its king. A chapter of the whole order was 
held at Limisso, on the shore of that island, to consult as 
to the best way to restore its stricken fortunes, and to adapt 
itself to new conditions. Among other new ventures a fleet 
was equipped, and with such success that, in 13809, Rhodes 
was captured, under Grand Master Villaret. The island 
was held for more than two centuries. 

So monks governed a kingdom on a tolerably extensive 
scale, nominally indeed under the suzerainty of the Emperor 
of the East, but practically in absolute sovereignty. New 
resources came in when greatly required, on account of the 
suppression of the Templars. 

The General Chapter was sovereign in legislation and 
discipline, the grand master being the executive, so that the 
constitution was democratic so far as the actual knights 
were concerned. ‘There were seven langes (Provence, Au- 
vergne, France, Italy, Aragon, Germany, England) consti- 
tuted in that form, after the healing of a schism occasioned 
by an anti-grand master who had risen against Villaret whom 
he accused of intolerable luxury. The local commanderies 
were under preceptors and held chapters every Sunday. 

They were grouped into priories with an annual chapter 
on the Feast of S. John. The priories numbered twenty- 
four, divided among the langes. Only the General Chapter 
had any legislative authority. This was a large inter- 
national body, the order having the very strange status of a 
sovereign state in its own territory, a monastic order in every 
country of Western Christendom, under a single control. 

At Rhodes, the knights were in a very favourable position 
to dominate the Christian communications with the East 


*Delaville Le Roulx, Cartulaire Général des Hospitaliers de Jérusa- 
lem, 1100-1310, Paris. 


THE MONK AS SOLDIER 203 


and to check the piracy of the Moslems. Unfortunately they 
afterwards took to piracy themselves and harassed the ship- 
ping of the Turks. This drew upon them the crushing 
wrath of the Ottoman Empire, but the knights repelled sev- 
eral attacks, one of them led by a member of the imperial 
house of the Paleologi, a renegade to Islam, commanding the 
forces of Mahomet II. 

Eventually, in 1522, the island was reduced by Suleiman 
II. During the very siege, the knights had been compelled 
to execute their chancellor, who tried to turn traitor because 
he had not been elected grand master, but their bravery so 
gained the admiration of the sultan that he provided ships 
to send them with honour to the West. 

By Charles V they were granted, in 1530, the island of 
Malta, a convenient base from which they renewed their 
maritime war on the Turks, and a monastic power controlled 
the central Mediterranean. In 1565, Suleiman, not un- 
naturally regretting his former generosity, dispatched a most 
formidable expedition under Mustapha to attempt to reduce 
Malta. The siege that followed was one of the most memor- 
able in all history. Under the heroic la Valette every attack 
was repulsed till an army of relief arrived from Spain. 

Thus, it was Christian monks that administered to the - 
Turkish power at its highest flood, the first serious reverse 
that it sustained. The crushing defeat at Lepanto followed 
in 1571. The restoration of the command of the Mediter- 
ranean to the Christian powers, partial as it might be, was 
owed very largely to the military monks. 

The later history of the order is far less glorious. A con- 
stant series of petty fights with the Barbary Corsairs seems 
to have done much to reduce the knights to the moral level of 
the pirates. The grand master’s authority was greatly dimin- 
ished by the tendency of individual knights in possession of 
the different commanderies to defy his power, and it was 
still further diminished by the Reformation. In 1798, Na- 


204 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


poleon was able to seize Malta itself, before long to pass 
into British hands. 

The order still exists, though, being partly Protestant, 

unity is lost; the office of grand master is in commission. 
For a time the venerable Hospital of S. Cross, near Winches- 
ter, was under the care of the knights, and the habit and 
cross worn by the present brethren of the institution still 
preserve the memory of the connexion. The English lange 
was revived in the early nineteenth century. JBesides its 
well known ambulance work, it maintains a hospital at Ash- 
ford. <A single convent remains to the old order in 8S. Maria 
del Priorato, on the Aventine Hill at Rome. 
- Though far less known to fame, the German orders were 
destined to play a larger part in the history of the world 
than either the Templars or the Hospitalers. In Jerusalem, 
under the Christian kingdom, was a hospital, S. Mary of the 
Germans, a refuge for pilgrims of Teutonic race. 

At the end of the twelfth century, as a result of the siege 
of Acre, a military and ambulance order was organized whose 
regular knights, according to the custom of the Germans, 
must be of noble birth. The grand master was limited in 
his power by the necessity of consulting his chapter. Em- 
perors and Popes heaped favours on the order of Teutonic 
Knights, who gave what help they could to Frederick IT 
on his crusade, ignoring his excommunication by the Pope. 

On the collapse of the crusading movement, a new sphere 
was opened to the knights on the far northeast frontier of 
the German lands, against the pagan hordes of Prussia, be- 
side the Baltic Sea. Thither the knights dispatched a great 
part of their forces on the invitation of the Polish king, but 
the grand master lived at Venice after Acre fell. On the 
Baltic, the order was soon enjoying great prosperity. One 
of its grand masters was Conrad, Landgrave of Thuringia, 
brother-in-law of S. Elizabeth of Hungary, whose hospital 
at Marburg was made over to the knights. 


THE MONK AS SOLDIER 205 


We get a very interesting opinion of their methods from 
Roger Bacon, whose views were extremely pacifist: “Hence 
the Saracens and pagans in many parts of the world are 
becoming quite impossible to convert; and especially beyond 
the sea, and in Prussia and the lands bordering on Germany, 
because the brethren of the German House (2.e. the Teutonic 
Knights) ruin all hopes of converting them, owing to the 
wars which they are always stirring up, and because of their 
lust of domination. 

“There is no doubt that all the heathen nations beyond 
Germany would long ago have been converted but for the 
brutality of the brethren of the German House, because the 
pagan race has again and again been ready to receive the 
faith in peace through preaching. But they of the German 
House will not allow it, because they want to subjugate them 
and reduce them to slavery, and by subtle persuasions they 
have for many years deceived the Roman church.” ® 

In 1309, the Grand Master transferred his seat to the 
strong castle of Marienburg, which’ became the capital of 
the order. Two other German military orders had joined, 
that of Christ and the Brethren of the Sword, both founded 
in earlier days to fight pagans along the Baltic shores. Thus 
Christian monks ruled a great European state, the first time 
that such sovereignty had been on any considerable scale. 
Their regular forces formed one of the strongest armies of 
Europe—far superior to feudal levies—and they conquered 
and Germanized far and wide. When, however, their real 
mission ended by the conversion of the Lithuanians, they 
tended more and more to secularization. In 1388 and again 
in 1409, they entered into commercial arrangements with 
England. Their power was severely restricted when Jagel- 
lon, the Duke of Lithuania, having embraced the Christian 

* Roger Bacon, Opus Mais, Pars III, cap. xiii. (Bridges, IIT, 120, 2.) 


Quoted A. G. Little, Studies in English Franciscan History, Ford Lec- 
tures, at Oxford in 1916, p. 211-2. 


206 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


faith, married the Polish queen, and so united those states. 
At the great battle of Tannenberg,® in 1410, he inflicted upon 
the knights so crushing a defeat that (eventually, after 
further hostilities) they had to cede to Poland half their 
territory, abandon their capital, and recognize the overlord- 
ship of Casimir, the Polish king. These arrangements were 
made by the treaty of Thorn in 1466. 

The new capital of the knights was Konigsberg, in Prussia, 
but so weakened was the order that it could no longer stand 
alone. For over a century it had formed the eastern bulwark 
of Germany, and on the different German states reliance had 
more and more to be placed. At the time of the Reformation 
the Grand Master was a German prince—Albert Hohenzol- 
lern Duke of Brandenburg; and in 1525, embracing Lu- 
theranism, he secularized the order, and joining its territories 
to his hereditary dominions and preserving his capital at 
Berlin, he started the career of Prussia as a European 
state. 

In 1701, his descendant secured the royal title. Thus the 
kingdom which eventually superseded Austria in the hege- 
mony of Germany was of direct monastic origin; its military 
tradition was derived from the old Teutonic Knights. 

Some of the members of the order in Germany had refused 
to recognize the acts of Grand Master Hohenzollern, and, 
in a gallant effort to maintain the old traditions, they elected 
as grand master, Walter of Cronenberg. Sovereignty was 
however lost, and the sadly reduced order became eventually 
purely Austrian, confined to religious work, but still rigidly 
exacting from its knights the strictest requirement of noble 
blood. 

Thus, of the three great military orders the Templars are 
the best known, but their legacy to Europe (outside of Portu- 


*How completely the Germans accept the Teutonic Knights as the 
founders of their power in these parts is evidenced from their having 
given this name to a battle in the same district in which they defeated 
the Russians during the recent war. 


THE MONK AS SOLDIER 207 


gal) is little more than a fine tradition and some beautiful 
churches in imitation of the Sepulchre (p. 234). 

The Hospitalers of S. John of Jerusalem accomplished 
by far the most of the three in their common original pur- 
pose. They have left an untarnishable military record and 
for ever possess the distinction of having given to the flowing 
tide of Ottoman power its first serious check. The Teutonic 
Knights, after extending the bounds of Christendom and 
building up a great monk-state, have been the main original 
creators of one of the chief European powers. ‘Theirs is 
undoubtedly the strangest record in the long annals of Chris- 
tian monasticism. 


BIBLIOGRAPHY: 


The original authorities for the contents of this chapter are, 
of course, distributed through a very great proportion of all the 
medieval chronicles that exist. 

Secondary works on the military orders are: Miraeus, Origine 
des chevaliers et ordres militatres, Antwerp, 1609; Lawrence 
Archer, Orders of Chivalry; Dupuis, Histoire de Vordre militaire 
des Templiers; Lejeune, Histoire critique et apologetique de 
Vordre des Templiers, 2 vols.; Delabre, Rhodes of the Knights. 

There is much about the knights of 8S. John in Stanley Lane 
Poole, Barbary Corsairs. 

A useful little text book about all three orders is F. C. Wood- 
house, The Military Orders. 

There is much interesting material in Delaville-Leroux, Cartu- 
lawre général des hospitaliers de Jerusalem en terre sainte et a 
Chypre (1100-1310). 


CHAPTER XIV 
MONASTIC LITERATURE 


Very many and most excellent things have been done for 
learning by members of religious orders, but they are far 
too miscellaneous and lacking in unity of any kind to form 
a connected chapter in the literature of mankind. In sub 
ject, they vary from the most abstruse questions of theology 
and philosophy to the head waters of the Great Lakes; in 
time, from the days when the Empire of Rome still stood, 
right up to the present hour. 

There never have been wanting in any age of the Church’s 
history those who have felt that too much care for secular 
learning might easily divert the attention of the monk from 
higher things. Roman though. he was, 8S. Gregory the 
Great (p. 86) felt very strongly that the devout Christian 
should not concern himself with unprofitable pagan studies. 
In a man of such overpowering vitality and vigour, one is 
inclined to think it must have been not mere slackness but / 
some such religious scruple that prevented him from acquir- 
ing the Greek tongue, even though resident for some years 
in Constantinople as the Apocrisiarius of the Pope. 

Herbert de Losinga, the first Bishop of Norwich (late 
eleventh century) once dreamed of a lady of awful majesty 
who said to him: “I was aware that from thy youth even 
to the hoar hairs of old age, which are now upon thee, thou 
hast taken upon thee the warfare of priestly functions; 
how then does it come that thou art still busy with the fictions 
of Ovid and the fabrications of Virgil? Unseemly it is that 

208 


MONASTIC LITERATURE 209 


Christ should be preached and Ovid recited by the same 
mouth.” ? 

A letter to “his beloved son, master Peter” from Peter the 
Venerable (p. 118) begins: ‘“Labouring as you are, most 
beloved son, in the study of profane literature and burdened 
with the heavy load of purely human learning, I grieve to 
think you are so wasting your time, and I can see no reward 
for your work nor any relief from your load.” ? 

Even more emphatic on the same lines is the present Su- 
perior-General of the French Benedictines: ‘The day that 
we sacrifice on the altar of study our conventual life, the 
solemn performance of the office, monastic regularity and 
stability, we lose our whole character, and almost our title 
to exist. Let us remember in what miserable fashion the 
Congregation of S. Maur ended. As soon as there is any 
human consideration, whether reputation, riches, or knowl- 
edge, which we put into the scale against God and which 
we use as a pretext for robbing Him, then our fall is near.” * 

Monastic literature of all ages is full of such sentiments; 
indeed it would be difficult to find any really whole-hearted 
endorsement of any other view from a responsible and repre- 
sentative monk. At Cluny, monks intimated to the librarian 
their opinion of the books they required by imitating the 
motions of a dog scratching his ear if they desired to consult 
a work of Classical antiquity.* 

Yet by the simple process of not preserving them in their — 
own libraries, the monks might have almost wiped out the 
writings both of Greece and Rome. It can hardly be stated 
too emphatically that the monk is the chief—and possibly 
in many lines the sole—intellectual link that binds ancient 


*Dean Goulburn and Henry Symonds, The Life, Letters and Sermons 
of Bishop Herbert de Losinga, Parker, 1878. 

7Migne, P.L. 189, col. 77. Peter the Venerable, Lib. I, Epis. ix. 

* Abbot Paul Delatte, of Solesmes, Commentary on the Rule of St. 
Benedict, English edition, p. 310. 

*Marténe, De Ant. Mon. Rit., vol. iv, 1.v.c.xviii, from Consue. Cluniac; 
quoted by R. 8. Storrs, Bernard of Clairvaua, p. 243. 


210 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


with modern times. The first person in Western Europe 
who had any idea of the immense services that the cloister 
might render to learning was Cassiodorus, the minister of 
Theodoric the Goth, who, on the reconquest of Italy by 
Belisarius about 540, retired to his estates in Bruttii, and 
there founded monasteries with the express object of foster- 
ing learning, both sacred and profane. 

Such work for monks was not entirely new. Even among 
the desert solitaries we read of a hermit, the blessed Evagrius, 
who got his living by writing books, but such learning was 
clearly exceptional; he had been a friend of Basil and Greg- 
ory Nazianzen.° As Hodgkin remarks: the zeal of Cassio- 
dorus for learning was “of infinite importance to the human 
race.® The monk with nothing but theology to oceupy his 
mind was only too likely to become a preacher of discord 
and mad fanaticism, but the preservation of the works of 
antiquity for future ages was one of the very greatest services 
that monasticism rendered or could have performed.” 

Nor was it only the works of Classical antiquity that were 
preserved from destruction, wholly or in part, by the monks. 
It is noteworthy that the famous Icelandic sagas, pagan 
though nearly all the more interesting of them are, were 
preserved in Benedictine convents. One of the editors of 
the “Landnamabok” * was Styrmir hinn frodi, Prior of the 
monastery at Videy (d. 1245). 

The chronicles that form the sources of our information 
for the history of the early Middle Ages were kept very 
largely by monks, and this includes many of the most valu- 
able such as Gildas, Bede, Einhard, William of Malmesbury, 
Symeon of Durham, and Matthew Paris. In this, however, 


5Palladius, Lausiac History, II, xiv. 

®* Italy and Her Invaders, IV, 391 seq. 

™Land-names-book, the Icelandic Domesday. 

® The stone church of this convent on an island in Reykjavik harbour 
seems to be about the only medieval building in Iceland which has 
survived. 


MONASTIC LITERATURE 211 


the cloister had no monopoly; Gregory of Tours, Adam of 
Bremen, Roger of Hoveden, and Henry of Huntingdon were 
secular clerks. | 

In the later Middle Ages, monastic predominance is less 
pronounced. J roissart was an ordinary priest; Wavrin a 
knight. The regular clergy, however, never abandoned the 
role of recording contemporary events; the charming narra- 
tive on which Washington Irving based his “Conquest of 
Granada,” was written by Agapida, a Franciscan. The 
“Greyfriars Chronicle’ of London describes events from 
1189 down to 1556, the last entries recording the burning 
of heretics by Mary. 

Even such works as in early times were not written by 
monks at all, such as the ‘“‘Saxon Chronicle” of Alfred, were 
apt to be preserved and continued in monasteries. In Iceland 
after the era of the sagas and eddas it was largely monks 
such as Arne of Thingore who kept such records as there 
are. In Eastern Europe the monks performed a very similar 
service; ‘Nestor’ in Russia is a well known example. 

That the keeping of records was a natural occupation for 
ascetics is most strikingly illustrated by the fact that in far 
off Japan, in the absence of any Confucian literati, records 
were kept chiefly by Buddhist monks, such as Kojima. 

For little less than a millennium, from the days of S. 
Jerome and S. Augustine, till the times of such great secular 
poets as Petrarch, Boccaccio, Dante, and Chaucer little of 
literary moment was written in Europe for which monks 
were not more or less responsible. Here and there, indeed, 
a layman such as Boethius might cast a last ray of glory 
over the declining firmament of Rome, an archdeacon like 
Walter Map satirize his time and in scorn send an ass to 
visit the monastic houses, or an emperor such as Frederick IT, 
patronize a culture with very different ideals; but nothing 
can change the fact that the literature of the early Middle 
Ages is predominantly monastic, little else. 


212 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


There are writers such as Czedmon who, while not actually 
monks, owed everything to monastic education and shelter; 
and the monastic tradition extended far beyond precinct 
walls. If all monastic literature were blotted out, it is 
hardly an exaggeration to say that our knowledge of our 
own race for long centuries would be nebulous in the extreme. 

This is indeed the case for a most important period, be- 
cause the Welsh monks Nennius and Gildas had so little 
of the historic sense that marked the Venerable Bede. If 
the monks of West and East had done nothing to preserve 
the writings of antiquity, much of the story of Europe might 
be nearly as much matter of conjecture as the origins of 
Mexico and Peru. There are books such as the “De Tribus 
Impostoribus” ® that would be of the utmost interest to our 
own day, but they seemed to the monks unworthy of pres- 
ervation. 

The great service rendered to humanity by monks by 
preserving the works of old is one that nobody will question, 
but it would probably be an exaggeration to say that they 
were entirely without helpers in the work. 

It can hardly be claimed that this preéminently monastic 
era in literature is a brilliant one, far otherwise, indeed. 
It is but the long-drawn interval between the writings of 
Roman days and the first dawn of the national literatures of 
modern- Europe. Hardly a writer, with the exception of 
Boethius, composed anything that could be claimed as one 
of the classics of the world. As pure literature perhaps 
the period gives us of its best in the sagas and eddas of 
Iceland. 

_ Yet the monks gave us very much that the world could 
never afford to let die. If the qualities of an Augustan 
age are lacking, charm and inspiration, high idealism, real 


® Moses, Christ and Mohammed. The work owed its origin to the very 
free atmosphere of the Sicilian court of Frederick II, and has sometimes 
been assigned to the Emperor himself. 





MONASTIC LITERATURE 213 


faith and conviction are there. The early Benedictine period 
may be said to culminate in S. Anselm, whose great work 
“Cur Deus homo?” seeks to explain the need for the In- 
-carnation—perhaps the chief problem of Christian theology 
—hby insisting on the requirements of satisfying a debt ac- 
cording to the conceptions of Roman law. 

Neither the Cluniac nor the Cistercian reforms were in 

the direction of fostering monastic scholarship; still less 
was this the case with the hermit orders. Nor were the 
different orders of canons concerned very much with such 
things. Nevertheless, the writings of S. Bernard exercised 
an influence both far-reaching and very great (p. 150). As 
the dictator of Europe, we have seen he left no enduring 
memorial, but his lengthy and almost Ciceronian sentences 
are in a sense the climax of monastic devotion. They in- 
fluenced the writings of the early Franciscans; they inspired 
the “Imitatio Christi”; they are very frequently quoted by 
Calvin. 
The purely devotional literature of the Middle Ages is 
mainly monastic, and there is an exceedingly uniform tradi- 
tion both about it and the lives of the saints that can only 
be accounted for by the fact that from its daily reading 
during their meals (p. 80) it became exceedingly familiar 
to the monks. It was probably thus, rather than by direct 
plagiarism, that the same things are repeated so many 
times. 

The culmination of the whole is in the “Imitatio Christi,” 
one of the classics of the world, written as the sands of 
medizvalism were running low, and a generation or two 
after the period when literature was prevailingly monastic. 
Thomas 4 Kempis (1380-1471), of German birth, was 
trained among the Brethren of the Common Life at Deventer. 
The brothers sought to revive the life of the early Christians 
but took no vows. In their homes or in community they 
tried to live in poverty, chastity, and obedience. Thomas 


214 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


afterwards went to a recently founded house of regular 
canons near Zwolle, of which his brother was Prior. 

An eminent man of letters has described his great master- 
piece as: “‘the flower of monastic poetry. It sets forth the 
monastic ideal in its passion, its beauty and all its imper- 
fections. * * * But the book is immortal because of its pas- 
sion, its truth, and its heroism. It is a noble exposition of 
one mode of spiritual life.” 7° 

The keynote of the whole seems to be given in the sen- 
tence: “Live in the world as a stranger and pilgrim, who 
has no concern with its business or pleasure.” 44 “Would 
to God that we had no other employment, but with heart and 
voice to glorify His holy Name; that we never stood in 
need of meat, drink or sleep.” 12 “It requires great skill to 
converse with Jesus, and great wisdom to know how to keep 
him.”’ 13 

For pure beauty the work is almost unexcelled and the 
latter part in the form of a long dialogue between Christ and 
a disciple is as sublime in its own way as anything that 
literature can offer. It is the old monastic spirit springing 
forth anew. 

Nothing about the material triumphs of monasticism for 
more than a thousand years, nothing about any special duty 
to fellow-man, simply the old message of the desert monks 
handed down through thirty generations. Salvation must be 
obtained by humble and fervent communion with our God. 
In the mouth of Christ are placed the words: “Abandon, 
therefore, all created things, that, by a faithful and pure 
adherence, thou mayest be acceptable to Him in Whom thou 
hast thy being, and in union with His Spirit enjoy ever- 
lasting felicity.” 74 

” Henry Dwight Sedgwick, Pro Vita Monastica, p. 46. 

UITmitatio Christi, bk. I, ch. xxiii, sec. 10. 

M7O..4; <XvV, 10, 


37b., III, viii, 3. 
4 7b,, ILI, i, 2. 





MONASTIC LITERATURE 215 


From the historical point of view, the supreme interest 
of the work lies in the fact that, purified, refined, and 
strengthened, we have Christian monasticism back at its 
earliest origins in tradition unbroken since the days of the 
Egyptian desert, affirming that if we desire assuredly to 
save our souls we can have time for nothing else. 

Monastic chroniclers unblushingly copy each other, es- 
pecially when recording the early story of the world, but 
when relating events of their own time, they have far 
more individuality than is at all usual in the devotional 
writings of monks. The tradition that the cloister was 
the best place for quiet and studious souls was so firmly 
established that many found their way thither who had little 
of the real spirit of asceticism. In his capacity of chronicler 
the monk by no means necessarily presents the clerical point 
of view. Matthew Paris himself, perhaps the most interest- 
ing of medieval historians before Froissart reveals himself 
indeed a devout and fervent Churchman, but no layman 
could be more free in his criticism of clergy, not excepting 
even the Pope. 

Doubtless a monastery on a frequented highway with its 
ceaseless stream of guests from every corner of the then known 
world was as good a place to learn the news as the Middle 
Ages afforded. At Reading guests came in every hour, and 
consumed more than the Cluniac monks of that house, but 
this was unusual.t® Frequently events were jotted down 
year by year as interesting things became known to the 
monk who was keeping the record. Sometimes he evidently 
let months pass without making any entries at all—the 
simple and entirely natural explanation of the fact that 
the same events are not infrequently entered by different 
chroniclers under slightly different years. 


18 William of Malmesbury, Chronicle of the Kings of England, bk. V, p. 
447, Giles’ edition. The house was founded by Henry I, especially to 
serve as a convenient hostel for travellers from London to the West. 


216 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


Despite the fact that Gratian, founder of the science of 
canon law at Bologna, was a Camaldolese and Abélard was 
also a monk—of a sort—the rise of universities was not pro- 
moted by monasticism, but by the secular clergy themselves. 
In the later Middle Ages the lamp of learning was very rap- 
idly passing from monkish hands. We have seen (p. 114) 
that nuns were recommended not to keep schools by their most 
trusted advisers at an earlier time, and teaching was less and 
less in the hands of regular clergy. ach secular cathedral 
and collegiate church had a school attached, which was not 
the case with the monasteries. In the later monastic build- 
ings, libraries are never prominent, though sometimes the 
scriptorium is a conspicuous feature of the cloisters.*® 

Dean Rashdall** has shown that there is almost no 
evidence at all to connect the rise of universities with mo- 
nasticism, and in this connexion it is significant that the 
architecture of the college is in no way based upon that of 
the convent. While the latter evolved an unchanging plan 
in which church, chapter house, refectory, dormitory, and 
other chambers had their regular places round the cloister 
garth, nothing of the kind ever appeared in the college. 
whose chapel, hall, library, and other buildings are found in 
every possible position round the quadrangle. 

It was not until the very end of the Middle Ages, when 
Henry VI began the sumptuous chapel for his King’s College 
at Cambridge that the first serious effort was made to give to 
university buildings any approach to the splendour of those 
of a monastery of the first class. The oldest colleges in Eng- 
land are relatively humble structures in no way more im- 
pressive than the large country houses in which their archi- 
tectural prototypes must be sought. On the Continent the 
buildings of medizeval universities were even less impressive. 


7% As at Chester. 
7 In his most valuable Unwersities of Burope in the Middle Ages, 2 
vols. 





a ee 


MONASTIC LITERATURE 217 


Even the later colleges of the latter part of the fourteenth 
and the fifteenth centuries, such as New and Magdalen at 
Oxford, will not bear one moment’s comparison with such 
an abbey as S. Alban’s or Furness; and when Wolsey at 
Oxford and Alcock at Cambridge were transforming reli- 
gious houses into colleges, they instinctively reduced the size 
of the chapels as unnecessarily large for academic worship.'® 

During the thirteenth century, however, when it appeared 
for a time that the torch of learning and literature was 
likely to slip from monastic hands almost entirely, the friars 
arose and strongly asserted ascetic leadership once more. 
S. Bonaventura (p. 88), the only very prominent Fran-: 
ciscan scholastic who was not British, is admirable in his 
devout mysticism, while still a master of dialectics, reviving 
the very best in the old tradition of monasticism. 

It was mainly by the Franciscans at Oxford that the new 
revival was begun. That was a rather strange development 
when one remembers how completely S. Francis himself had 
subordinated knowledge to spirituality (p. 159). It is not 
very easy to imagine him at home in the lecture rooms of a 
university, but no one can bind his disciples of a later 
generation. 

The two great orders of friars appear indeed to present us 
with a triple paradox. S. Francis cared little for learning, 
yet on the whole his sons have done rather more in that direc- 
tion than the Dominicans; S. Francis was much more artistic 
in temperament than the Spaniard, yet the chief friar artists 
were Dominicians (p. 235); S. Francis had more democratic 
ideals than S. Dominic, yet the Dominicans produced by far 
the more liberal constitution (p. 194). 

By Grosseteste, a Franciscan lecturer in the university, 
and rector of the schools, afterwards the renowned Bishop 
of Lincoln, important new methods were inaugurated—the 


*The abbey of S. Frideswide at Oxford was converted into Christ 
Church; that of S. Radegund at Cambridge into Jesus College. 


218 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


study of foreign languages and the use of exact mathematics 
as the basis of physical science. 

By far the most distinguished of his pupils was Roger 
Bacon, whose ideals in science and particularly the need for 
practical experiment so largely adumbrate the work of his 
later namesake, Francis Bacon, Viscount 8. Albans. He 
anticipated in some degree the invention of the telescope 
and of gunpowder in a rudimentary form; had he possessed 
the requisite equipment he might undoubtedly have become 
one of the greatest scientists of the world. 

He was convinced that the study of the ancient languages 
and of mathematics was the proper basis for a liberal educa- 
tion. He desired the reading of Aristotle in his original 
Greek (while very fully realizing the value of the learning 
of the Arabs), and of the Bible in its original tongues. » 

All other studies were regarded by Bacon, as by more 
orthodox Franciscans, as leading up to theology. He defines 
philosophy as “the endeavour to arrive at a knowledge of the 
Creator through knowledge of the created world,’® thus an- 
ticipating a vast field of modern ideals. To a great extent 
Roger Bacon was the real founder of the liberal English 
Franciscan tradition, anticipating Duns Scotus and William 
of Ockham. 

The Dominicans, under the inspiration of S. Thomas 
Aquinas (1228-1274), rigidly maintained the straitest ortho- 
doxy. Christ’s death was the only possible satisfaction for 
the sins of the world; the extreme views of S. Augustine 
were taught concerning predestination; S. Anselm and S. 
Bernard were followed in the matter of the Immaculate 
Conception. 

The English Franciscan, Alexander of Hales, who died 
in Paris, 1245, a thoroughgoing realist, was responsible for 
the theory of the thesaurus meritorum, or treasure-house of 
the merits of the saints, and of Christ Himself, at the dis- 

* Opus maius (Bridges), I, 42. 





MONASTIC LITERATURE 219 


posal of the Church which might be made available by 
means of indulgences—a conception of much interest as 
largely responsible for the doctrinal enquiries in the famous 
theses of another friar, Martin Luther, in 1517. 

Eventually in the hands of Duns Scotus (d. 1808) and 
William of Ockham (c. 1280-1349) the Franciscan school 
became in some respects more liberal than the Dominican. 
The Immaculate Conception of the Virgin was maintained, 
but it was held that God might have accepted anything else 
than the death of Christ as expiation for the sins of the 
world; good and bad depend purely on the will of God. Man 
has effective free will. 

Although his own pupil, Ockham represents a reaction 
against Scotus, returning to something very like the con- 
ceptualism of Abélard, while on every philosophical question 
he takes a line which, as Dean Rashdall says, represents the 
perfection of common sense.”° In theology, while maintain- 
ing the old monastic doctrine of the poverty of Christ and 
His disciples, he declines to apply reason to faith. ‘This was 
left, largely, for John Wyckliffe, the next great Oxford 
schoolman, the vigorous opponent of friars and all their 
works, ** 

Even in the days of the Renaissance monasticism had by 
no means lost its force. Erasmus and Luther, though neither 
had very much of the true ascetic spirit, both owed their 
education mainly to the cloister, and both became regulars, 
Erasmus a canon, Luther a friar. Despite all the activities 
of his later life in a very different direction, Luther retained 
to the end at least this much of the monastic spirit, that, 
living in an age of amazingly expanding knowledge, neither 
in his letters, nor his table talk, nor in any of his extremely 
voluminous writings does he display any real interest in any 


2” Universities of Ewrope, vol. II, p. 536. 

Though monks never played any great part at the universities, the 
Benedictine order maintained at Oxford Gloucester Hall, whose build- 
ings now form part of Worcester College. 


220 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


other subject than theology. All the art and the maritime 
discoveries of that brilliant age left him absolutely cold. 

In the famous incident at the Wartburg, when he hurled 
his ink-pot at the devil, he gave another proof of the abiding 
force of the permanence in monasticism of the ideas of the 
Egyptian monks. In many ways the far kindlier and more 
lovable Erasmus, though ever unwilling with the reformers 
to rend the seamless robe of Christ, reacted even further than 
Luther from the ancient monastic spirit. 

It is noteworthy that in the realm of foreign exploration, 
which was one of the chief achievements of the Renaissance, 
very many actors and writers belonged to the religious 
orders. In no continent is it possible to ignore the geo- 
graphical works of the regulars; in mere information they 
undoubtedly contributed at least as much as the laity. If 
we desire any detailed knowledge of early Western inter- 
course with China and Japan, of exploration in Abyssinia 
or Michigan, of the dialects of negro tribes or the mysteries 
of Far Eastern islands, it is to the writings of the monastic 
missionaries that we must turn. 

Scholastic discussion was unfortunately revived when in 
1588 the Portuguese Jesuit, Molina, published a book taking 
what was practically a semi-Pelagian (p. 103) view of the 
vexed question of predestination. The Jesuits, always lib- 
eral in their theology, accepted the work, but the Domini- 
cans vehemently supported the strict Augustinian view, 
which had become widely diffused through Protestant Europe 
by the vigorous propaganda of the Calvinists. 

This monastic discussion was inevitably carried to the 
Papal court, but suecessive Popes wisely let the question 
rest till it was revived by the publication, by Cornelius 
Jansen, a Dutch bishop, of a learned folio in support of the 
traditional faith. This was condemned by the Pope, but 
many, nevertheless, rallied to the defence of Jansen’s views. 
(The Bishop himself had died in 1638.) 





: = — = a ae 
Se ee, Pee Se eS 


ewe ee Oe eee 


MONASTIC LITERATURE 221 


The most interesting of them was the Frenchman, Blaise 
Pascal, who became identified with the famous Jansenist 
cloister-school, which was established at the ancient Cister- 
cian Convent of Port Royal, when the nuns had removed to 
Paris. The age of Louis XIV was convulsed by the contro- 
versy which, for the modern reader, is complicated by the 
fact that though Pascal is in some ways more lovable than his 
Jesuit opponents, his virtually Calvinistic theology seems 
quite impossible today. 

A more satisfactory subject is the magnificent work of the 
Maurists, a congregation of French Benedictines who, from 
the early years of the seventeenth century till the revolution, 
devoted themselves to historical criticism and erudition of 
value to all scholars. The beginnings of the work received 
the encouragement of Richelieu. Generation after genera- 
tion codperated to edit the Fathers and collect historical 
material on a scale hardly dreamed of before in the history 
of the world, at any rate not in connexion with the annals of 
the Christian Church. The congregation was fortunate in 
the services of a succession of able scholars of whom Mabillon 
is the best known, but apparently in its great convent of 
S. Germain-des-Prés there was a tendency for scholarship to 
get the better of purely monastic devotion. And worse scan- 
dals arose with which we need not be concerned (p. 209). 

A similar work among the Jesuits began about the same 
time and is’ still continued, being concerned with editing 
and investigating the acta sanctorum. It takes its name from 
a Dutch Jesuit, John van Bolland (1596-1665), but he was 
not the first founder of the movement. 

That monasticism has produced any great share of the 
first writings of mankind, or has contributed many of its 
great classics to the world, is not to be maintained. It is 
hardly possible in the realm of pure literature to place 
Augustine’s “City of God” or Thomas 4 Kempis’ “Imita- 

tion of Christ” on the same pedestal as Shakespeare’s 


222 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


Plays, or indeed anywhere near so high. Probably it must 
frankly be confessed that in the temple of letters there are 
but few outstanding monks. In nearly every case their 
chronicles, lives of saints, meditations, and revelations are 
of far greater interest than of pure literary merit. 

This is no reproach. The founders of Christian monasti- 
cism (and apparently living monks such as Delatte) would 
rather be ashamed that monks have written so much than 
regretful that they devoted no more attention to letters. 

Yet even in the shrine of literature the monk must be 
assigned a very honoured place. In its very darkest hours it 
was he that guarded learning and preserved it from utter 
loss) Who knows if even Dante, Shakespeare, Moliére, or 
Johnson’s literary club could have been what in fact they 
were but for the background provided by the monks? 


BIBLIOGRAPHY: 


Many of the works of my fellow Wykenhamist, Arthur F. Leach, 
particularly The Schools of Medieval England and English 
Schools at the Reformation are of the very utmost importance in 
connexion with the subject of this chapter. Starting from his re- 
searches into the history of Winchester College, he has become a 
great champion of the secular clergy against the monks, par- 
ticularly in the domain of learning. 

Dean Rashdall’s Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages 
(2 vols.) is quite indispensable for the origin of the universities 
and their capture for a time by the friars. 

It is most difficult to say exactly how far monks alone pre- 
served the writings of antiquity. A few facts of interest in that 
connexion may be gained from F. W. Hall’s Companion to Classical 
Texts, Oxford, 1918. 


ea ee 


x. _ 


CHAPTER XV 
MONASTIC ART 


On no subject, perhaps, has the ordinary student, even 
though tolerably well versed in medieval history, more con- 
fused ideas than on that of monastic contributions to art, 
whether sculpture, painting, or architecture. While the 
undoubted activities of the monk on many lines are hardly 
realized at all, they are here frequently grotesquely exag- 
gerated. ‘The monk is not seldom given credit for work that 
perhaps no monk ever saw. 

That monasticism made its influence felt in all branches 
of Christian art will hardly be denied, but it is by no means 
so clear that there was ever a monastic school. Parish 
churches and secular cathedrals were seldom slow to adopt 
conventual designs and the influence was wholly reciprocal. 

In the earliest times, very logically, art was not deemed 
suited to monks’ surroundings at all. Of their first Father 
we read: “The blessed man Pachomius built an oratory in 
his monastery, and he made pillars for it, and covered them 
with tiles, and he furnished it beautifully, and he was ex- 
ceedingly pleased with the work because he had built it well. 

“But when he came to himself he declared, through the 
agency of Satan, that the beauty of the oratory was a thing 
which would compel a man to admire it, and that the build- 
ing thereof would be praised. Then suddenly he rose up 
and took ropes, and fastened them round the pillars, and he 
made a prayer within himself, and commanded the brethren 
to help him, and they bowed their bodies, and the pillars and 

223 


224 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 
the whole construction fell to the ground. And he said to 


the brethren: ‘Take heed lest ye strive to ornament the work 


of your hands overmuch, and take ye the greatest possible 
care that the grace of God and His gift may be in the work 
of each one of you, so that the mind may not stumble towards 
the praises of cunning wickedness, and the calumniator may 
not obtain his prey.’”* Such prejudices were gradually 
overcome and monks were soon building churches as stately 
and as superbly adorned as any to be found in the world. 

It seems clear enough that in very early Christian times 
there was a marked difference between the ritual arrange- 
ments of a church attended by laity and an oratory in which 
monks said their offices. An ancient form of the parish 
church may still be studied at Rome, particularly in S. 
Clemente. 

The altar stands in the apse with a bench of stone having 
a central arm chair round behind it. ‘The eastern part of 
the nave is enclosed by cancellt or railings to form a chancel 
in which the choir stand, and on either side is an ambo or 
pulpit; from that on the north the Gospel was read, the 
Epistle from that on the south. This is the oldest arrange- 
ment known, and it has nothing to do with monks. 

A monastic oratory had no nave at all, for the presence of 
laity was entirely undesired.? Cassian gives a very inter- 
esting hint as to the arrangement of the choir: “This ca- 
nonical system of twelve psalms they render easier by such 
bodily rest that when, after their custom, they celebrate 
those services, they all, except the one who stands up in the 
midst to recite the psalms, sit in very low stalls and follow 
the voice of the singer with the utmost attention of heart. 
For they are so worn out with fasting and working all day 
and night that, unless they were helped by some such indul- 


The Rule of Pachomius at Tabenna, ch. xvi. Budge, Paradise of the 


Holy Fathers, vol. i, p. 310. st 
* This is very clear from the whole tenor of early monastic writings. 


= 


—— es ee 


MONASTIC ART 225 


gence, they could not possibly get through this number 
standing up.” ® 

Monastic choir stalls thus evidently date from the earliest 
times, and they must have been ranged against the walls 
leaving a wide open space in the centre. But it is clear from 
the famous plan of the vast Irish abbey of 8. Gall, in Swit- 
zerland (p. 179), dating early in the ninth century,* that 
they were not universal. That great church was so much 
too large for the monks that it was divided up into several 
chapels by screens with a multiplicity of altars. The chorus 
must have stood within cancellt, for no stalls are shown, 
though in the space before the steps leading to the high altar 
are four formule, or desks from which portions of the service 
were recited. 

This is illustrated by the fact that Somers Clarke found 
suggestions of cancellc in the big monastic church of Dér 
Amba Shnila (Dér el Abiad) near Sohag in Egypt. Even- 
tually cancellt became quite obsolete and the monastic stalls 
were adopted in churches of all kinds, secular cathedrals, 
collegiate, and even parish churches no less than those used 
by the monks. Often splendidly carved and canopied, stalls 
became one of the noblest features of Christian architecture 
in Western Europe.® In the East no seats are provided for 
choir and laity, and in this respect there is no difference 
between monastic and secular churches of the Orthodox 
Communion. 

M. Albert Lenoir seems to go very far beyond any evi- 
dence we have in his sweeping statement: “‘As soon as St. 
Benedict had set forth in his rule that architecture, paint- 

? Institutes, bk. II, ch. xii. 

*The author is unknown; Mabillon guessed Einhard (p. 93). 

‘He cautiously adds: “It has, however, to be shown by those learned 
in such matters that in monastic churches of this remote period in 
Egypt any such ritual arrangement was in use as would demand can- 
celli.” Christian Antiquities mm the Nile Valley, p. 155. 


°A fair idea can be obtained in the Episcopal cathedral at Albany, 
N. Y., whose stalls were brought from Flanders. 


226 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


ing, mosaic, sculpture, and all the branches of art should be 
studied in monasteries, it became the first duty of the abbots, 
priors, and deans, to make plans of churches and secondary 
buildings of the communities that they were called upon to 
rule. It follows that from the first Christian centuries up 
to the twelfth or thirteenth, architecture, the science deemed 
sacred and holy, was practised only by the religious.” * 

He proceeds to give descriptions of many of the early 
basilicas, especially those in Rome, as the work of monks, 
but without a particle of proof. The magnificent basilica at 
Bethlehem certainly antedates them all as well as antici- 
pating most of their features. It was erected by S. Helena,® 
certainly not under monastic auspices, though before very 
long ascetics may have been in charge of it, as is now the 
ease. It must have been in process of construction about the 
very time that Pachomius was tearing down his oratory as 
too beautiful for the worship of monks. 

It would appear to be a virtually impossible task to assign 
many of the early Christian churches to monastic or secular 
builders, nor would such a division, if it could be made, have 
any particular significance. There certainly were no sepa- 
rate schools of secular and monastic Church art, either then 
or at any other period, although monks did undoubtedly 
evolve an exceedingly striking and beautiful plan for their 
buildings which was widely copied by secular canons, but 
never by college dons (p. 216). 

In most of its chief features this is complete in the plan 
of the Abbey of S. Gall already mentioned, which is a docu- 
ment of the most extraordinary interest. The church is on 
such a scale as to have dominated its whole surroundings 
quite as much as in any later medieval abbey, though the 
building has no transepts, but forms a large basilica with 


tArchitecture Monastique (1852), vol. i, pp. 34-35. Lenoir seems 
most unwarrantably to have expanded S. Benedict’s simple provisions 
about work for his monks. 

® Socrates, Hecl. Hist., I, xvii. 





MONASTIC ART 227 


apse at either end, and detached from the western end are 
two round towers on whose summits stand altars to S. Mi- 
chael and S. Gabriel respectively. These were later replaced 
by western towers flanking the facade of the church, as the 
general scheme was gradually developed. 

Apart from the church, the very extensive monastic build- 
ings rather closely resemble a section of the richer portion 
of Pompeii or of some other Roman town. Each structure 
is grouped round an open court providing very ample space 
for infirmary, guest house, school, abbot’s mansion, stables, 
servants’ quarters, and very extensive farm buildings. 

By far the largest of all the courts is the cloister, standing 
immediately south of the church, its four walks opening by 
arches to the central garth or “paradise” as it was later 
called. Along the south side is the refectory with kitchen 
to its west; the western side of the cloister is occupied by 
cellars and store rooms above them; on the east the upper 
building is the monks’ dormitory.® 

All this is in accordance with the usual medieval plan, 
but instead of a chapter house there is a warming house 
under the dormitory, and east of the refectory (where the 
warming house was later to be found) is a bath, a feature 
not deemed necessary as the traditions of Roman methods 
of living got fainter in the latter part of the Middle Ages. 

This comprehensive monastic plan, with its superb views 
of church and other buildings, seen in constantly varying 
groups through the open arches or windows across the cloister 
grass as one saunters round the four walks, was perhaps the 
greatest contribution that monasticism ever made to archi- 
tecture. It is so superbly beautiful that it certainly is not 


°Tt is rather remarkable that the library is only a small chamber 
over the room where MSS. were copied, structurally part of the church 
matching the vestry, one on either side of the choir. Some of the Latin 
inscriptions which explain the plan are in the conditional; it is probable 
that the plan was not carried out at the time the drawing was made, if 
ever. This, of course, makes little or no difference to its value. 


228 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


surprising to find it very widely imitated in secular cathe — 
drals and churches. Sometimes, as at Salisbury, the clois — 
ters and chapter house were erected in the ordinary monastic © 
position ; sometimes, as at Lincoln, in a totally different one. 
Here, in fact, as at Wells, the chapter house and cloisters 
were built entirely apart. 

The cloister is in itself a feature of such rare charm that 
it seems quite proper to see it introduced in all sorts of un- 
expected positions as it could be got in; at Rouen Cathedral 
we find a double cloister walk on the north side of the nave; 
at Chichester, toward the end of the Middle Ages, three 
cloister walks were provided, enclosing a beautiful garth, 
into which the south transept projects, but the existence of 
other buildings prevented the walks being regular or ever 
at right angles to each other. 

Evidently it was not until about the eleventh century that 
the monastic cloister plan won universal recognition. The 
Abbey of Croyland, raised over the place where the Mercian 
hermit, S. Guthlac (d. 714) had settled in search of soli- 
tude among the fens of Lincolnshire, during the tenth cen- 
tury, followed no regular plan. On the west side of the 
court stood stable, bakehouse, and granary; on the south 
were the guesten hall and connected chambers; on the east, 
the tailors’ room, the hall of converts and the abbot’s cham- 
ber, chapel, hall, and kitchen; the great gateway opened on 
the north.*° Nearly all was of timber, and in 1091 the 
whole abbey was burned by the carelessness of a plumber who 
left a fire merely covered with ashes in the tower of the 
church overnight. 

The subsequent history of the house was typical of that 
of many another abbey. It was magnificently rebuilt in the 
usual Norman style, undoubtedly according to the usual 
cloister plan. An arch of the central tower and other Norman 


Maitland, Dark Ages, p. 250; his account based on the writings of 
Ingulph, Abbot in 1091. 





MONASTIC ART 229 


parts yet stand, while many ornamented caps and bases are 
used as foundation for the later piers of the nave—for a 
rebuilding was made necessary again when the greater part 
was blown down during a furious storm. 

To judge by the style of what exists, the work went on 
very slowly. All is in ruin except the north aisle of the nave 
which still remains, what it always was, the parish church 
of the little town that gathered round the house. 

In the East it seems that no monastic plan was ever. 
evolved—to the very great loss in charm of the convents of 
the Orthodox Communion. The church generally stands 
more or less detached, surrounded by the dwellings of the 
monks with hardly more plan than is to be found in the 
cottages of an ancient village. Sometimes the necessities 
for defence cause the buildings to be very compact. The 
beautiful Western form of the cloister is nearly unknown 
in the East, except as the result of foreign influence. The 
Crusaders built a cloister against the Church of the Holy 
Sepulchre at Jerusalem. The singularly beautiful monastic 
church at Daphne, on the high road from Athens to Eleusis, 
has the ruins of a cloister on its southern side, but this was 
certainly the work of the Frank Dukes of Athens, some of 
whom are buried in the building. Their thirteenth century 
additions in the style of Western Europe do not harmonize 
very well with the original Byzantine work. The East, lack- 
ing the Western fondness for organization, has never made 
quite the same clear distinction between cathedrals, parish 
churches, and conventual chapels that is so characteristic 
of'the West. 

It is noteworthy that we do not find in the ordinary 
monastic plan a’ church specially adapted for conventual 
purposes. Large naves were retained, though they served 
no particular purpose and were indeed almost disused unless 
the abbey church was also a cathedral or partly used by a 

™ Recorded by “Matthew of Westminster” in 1262. 


230 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


parish congregation. Apparently the nave of a purely mo- 
nastic church served no other purpose than for the Sunday 
procession and as a place of sepulture. It was almost in- 
variably separated from the choir by so heavy a screen that 
it was impossible to use the church as a whole. 

This was a fashion largely copied in secular churches, 
such as Exeter and York. It certainly increases the effect 
of vastness and mystery which is so great a charm of Gothic 
architecture, but for congregational purposes it is not very 
convenient. 

Most unusual but exceedingly interesting examples of 
churches designed purely for monastic purposes may be seen 
at Kelso, an abbey (Benedictine of the order of Tiron) that 
was one of the most important in Scotland, at Ely and at 
Bury St. Edmunds. At the west end is provided a square 
and aisleless transept at whose intersection with the nave 
rises a magnificent castle-like tower, presenting, even as a 
broken ruin, at Kelso, a most striking and dominating effect, 
while at Ely it is one of the noblest architectural monuments 
of the world. But this splendid feature seems to have had 
nothing to do with the ritual arrangements of the monks. 
It led to no definitely monastic style. 

It seems to have had no imitators. In later times col- 
legiate churches were designed with the nave omitted, the 
transept forming an ante-chapel. New, Magdalen, and All 
Souls Colleges at Oxford are examples. 

All scruples that may have survived from early times as 
to the magnificence of monastic churches were soon set aside. 
In some European countries, notably Ireland and Scotland, 
the abbeys were finer than the cathedrals, while in no 
land whatever are conventual churches conspicuously over- 
shadowed by any others. 

The Cistercians at first made a determined effort to return 
to primitive simplicity and S. Bernard most vigorously de- 
nounces the architectural splendour of Cluny, happily uncon- 


tee eee oe 


ee ee ee 


MONASTIC ART 231 


scious that in less than a century monks of his own order 
would be worshipping in buildings of equal splendour. “O 
vanity of vanities! but not more vain than foolish. The 
church’s walls are resplendent, but the poor are not 
there. * * * 

“Why at least do we not reverence the images of the 
saints, with which the very pavement we walk on is 
covered? Often an angel’s mouth is spit into, and the 
face of some saint trodden on by passers-by. * * * But 
if we cannot do without the images, why can we not spare 
the brilliant colours? What has all this to do with 
monks, with professors of poverty, with men of spiritual 
minds ? 

“Again in the cloisters, what is the meaning of those 
ridiculous monsters, of that deformed beauty, that beautiful 
deformity, before the very eyes of the brethren when read- 
ing? What are disgusting monkeys there for, or ferocious 
lions, or monstrous centaurs, or spotted tigers, or fighting 
soldiers, or huntsmen sounding the bugle? You may see 
there one head with many bodies, or one body with numerous 
heads. Here is a quadruped with a serpent’s tail; there is 
a fish with a beast’s head; there a creature, in front a horse, 
behind a goat; another has horns at one end, and a horse’s 
tail at the other. 

“In fact, such an endless variety of forms appears every- 
where, that it is more pleasant to read in the stone work 
than in books, and to spend the day in admiring these oddi- 
ties than in meditating on the law of God.” 

The Cistercians ever preserved a dignified simplicity, that 
was shown chiefly in omitting carved details, and is rather 
an improvement than otherwise. The French antiquary, 
M. Enlart, expresses it exactly in speaking of “Une certaine 
simplicité de bon gotit que Von pourrait considérer comme 
un raffinement de plus.’1* With all its Cistercian sim- 

™ Manuel dArchéologie francaise; I, 1902, 202. 


232 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


plicity the Nine Altars at Fountains must have been one of 
the loveliest monuments of Gothic architecture in Europe. 

How very little a monastic style can be said to have 
existed is evident from the fact that no two large medieval 
buildings have a closer resemblance than the cathedral at 
Sens and the choir of Canterbury; both were erected under 
the supervision of the same master mason, William of 
Sens, yet the French church was always secular, the Eng- 
lish one, till the Reformation, monastic. Canterbury Cathe- 
dral is of great importance as the first instance of Gothic 
forms superseding Romanesque in England. It is thus par- 
ticularly interesting to know on the authority of a most 
detailed monastic record that the credit must be given to a 
French layman.* 

Both the designers of the great French cathedrals and the 
Italian maestri Comacint (for whom Merzario has made 
such claims) were laity, and it is impossible to assign to the 
regulars any very important share in the development of 
medizval architecture. 

Contrary to a very general impression, the monk was 
rather a patron of art than himself a skilled craftsman. In 
his second Lowell lecture (1923) G. G. Coulton, of Cam- 
bridge University, entirely demolished Montalembert’s con- 
tention that monks with their own hands normally either 
built or painted or carved. They sometimes did, but it was 
the rare exception, not the rule. 

At Ramsey, in Huntingdonshire, we read concerning the 
erection of the Saxon abbey, that “the labourers, inspired as 
much by the warmth of their pious devotion as by their 

*Gervase, a monk of Canterbury, gives a minute description of the 
rebuilding of the choir at Canterbury after the fire of 1174. English 
and French artificers disagreed in their advice as to how much of the 
old masonry must be destroyed and the monks were much in doubt till 
there came “guidam WSenonensis, Willelmus nomine, vir admodum 
strenuus, in ligno et lapide artifex subtilissimus,”’ who completely won 


their confidence and planned the choir which still exists. It was a monk 
that took his place as director when the health of William failed. 





MONASTIC ART 233 


desire for pay were instant with their toil.”1* Gilbert, 
Abbot of Westminster, in his “Life of Lanfranc,” tells us 
that on arriving at Bec he found Herluin building an oven 
with his own hands, but later he (Lanfranc) earned money 
by teaching school, to pay workmen for the building. A 
very interesting illustration of the whole point is to be 
studied at Gloucester, where a section of the nave vault was 
built by the monks themselves and not like the rest by the 
workmen. The stone roof in question still exists and, beau- 
tiful as it is, the work has a distinctly amateurish look, par- 
ticularly in the way the ribs are crowded.’*° The occasions 
on which monks had anything directly to do with the building 
of their own churches seem to be surprisingly few. A strik- 
ing example is the well known case of the very humble little 
chapel built for the Greyfriars at Cambridge, so poor a 
structure that one man in one day made and set up four- 
teen pairs of rafters, but it was not a friar—‘“unus car 
pentartus.” 18 
_ At the same time, it must be remembered that one of the 
most striking features of all architecture, the central octagon’ 
at Ely, was designed by a monk, who also planned the Lady 
Chapel of the same cathedral, and the Church of Little St. 
Mary, at Cambridge—Alan de Walsingham, the sub-Prior. 
Though this splendid structure found no imitator during 
the Middle Ages, Ely octagon certainly suggested the treat- 
ment that became one of the most distinctive features of 
Renaissance work of which S. Paul’s is the finest example. 
It would be a perfectly impossible task to write a history 
of architecture, assigning due credit to both monastic and 
secular creators, for their contributions are everywhere inter- 


* Chronicon Abbatie Rameseiensis, anno 969. 

1% Historia Monasterti 8S. Petri Gloucestrie (Rolls Series), 1242. 
“Completa est nova volta in navi ecclesiw, non ausxilio fabrorum ut 
primo, sed animosa virtute monachorum item in ipso loco existentium.” 

4% Thomas de Eccleston: De adventu Minorum in Angliam, Collatio 
ili. Monumenta Franciscana, I, 18. 


234 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


twined. » Not infrequently we find what might be supposed 
to be the most purely conventual features in churches that 
were always secular. At 8S. David’s, in Wales, we see in 
addition to a hugely massive screen of stone completely shut- 
ting off the nave, a light wooden one separating the choir 
stalls from the sanctuary, which would seem most suitable for 
a monastic community saying their numerous offices, but the 
cathedral was always secular and the same screen before the 
altar is found in parish churches, for example S. Martin’s 
at Colchester. 

College chapels of the mediseval period are much more 
unlike ordinary parish churches than are the oratories in 
which monks used to pray. It would be far easier to believe 
in a collegiate than in a monastic architectural style. 

There are, nevertheless, a few quite distinctively monastic 
forms in building in addition to those already mentioned. 
The Knights Templars introduced into Western Europe thé 
circular form of the Church of the Sepulchre, and some of 
their reproductions of it may still be seen. An admirable 
example is the Temple Church in London (now used by two 
Inns of Court), a relatively large building with an aisle all 
round; at Laon is a very tiny aisleless church that displays 
the same features on a much smaller scale. At Sompting in 
Sussex the Templars seem to have attempted to reproduce 
the effect of the little curtained side chapels that complicate 
the plan of the Church of the Sepulchre. 

In the British Isles the friars during the fifteenth century 
evolved a form of church peculiarly their own, of which very 
many examples remain in every part of Ireland. The large 
nave which served for preaching is separated from the chan- 
cel (which formed the friars’ choir) by a tall and very narrow 
tower, hexagonal, octagonal, or square, resting upon arches 
frequently so narrow and low that the two portions of the 
church appear to be connected by a mere tunnel. The details 
are rather thin and poor in nearly every case and the form 


MONASTIC ART 235 


is not pleasing; evidently it was deemed specially suited to 
strict ascetics, and it is found at the Carthusian house of 
Mount Grace (p. 118). 

This type of church appears to be almost confined to 
monastic use, but it may be seen in the rather poor little 
secular cathedral at Leighlin, County Carlow, in Ireland. 
The largest and most striking surviving example is the 
Dominican church, now 8S. Andrew’s Hall, at Norwich. The 
friars reproduced the ordinary cloister plan of the monks, 
but nearly invariably placed the church on the south instead 
of the north side of the convent.?? 

In late medizeval and early Renaissance days the friars of » 
all four orders, but particularly the Franciscans and Domini- 
cans, were great patrons of art. Very many of the works 
of the masters adorned their convents and churches, but 
there is nothing distinctly monastic about them. It was in 
strange contrast with the original profession of absolute 
poverty, more especially as the friar in most cases employed 
secular masters to paint the pictures with which his home 
was made beautiful. 

Three friars may claim to stand among the masters, but — 
they hardly form any school. Fra Angelico (1387-1455) is 
justly famed for the pure holiness of his superb pictures. 
Especially in his angels and his figures of Christ with their 
wonderful colouring and exquisite detail, we seem to get 
some reflexion of the saintly life of their maker, but even so, 
for true spirituality they can hardly be said to excel the well- 
known head of Christ that was painted by the scoffing Leon- 
ardo da Vinci. Fra Angelico was a Dominican and long 
lived at the convent of San Marco in Florence, where so’ 
many of his works may still be seen. 

Fra Filippo Lippi (c. 1412-1469) was a Carmelite, but 
his life reflected little credit on the order, and he afterwards 


There are plenty of cases of the monks’ doing this, as at Gloucester, 
Sherborne, and Melrose, but it was exceptional. 


236 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


lived with a nun. The flowing beauty of his draperies and 
admirable technique give him a great place among artists, 
but his rather voluptuous figures and interest in the nude do 
not suggest the craft of a monk. 

Fra Bartolommeo (1469-1517), the friend of Savonarola 
and later of Raphael, was an excellent and devout Dominican 
friar, whose pictures possess a very true atmosphere of reli- 
gious fervour and devotion, while his angels and saints dis- 
play a tenderness and sweet dignity that suggests that, had 
conditions been favourable to it, a truly monastic school of 
painting might quite easily have been brought into being. 

Eccleston tells us that a pulpit at Gloucester was painted 
by a friar during the first generation, about 1230, while 
another, Nicolas de Renham, made some ornamental iron- 
work for a chapel in the Greyfriars’ church at London.*8 
But at no time did the cultivation of the arts form any 
serious part of the programme of the monastic orders. 

Church embroidery and the illumination of manuscripts, 
particularly the latter, form more distinctively ascetic crafts, 
but even so, neither of them seems to have been practised 
solely in religious houses. There is no doubt that from the 
time of Cassiodorus (p. 210) monks devoted much time and 
labour to the reproduction of manuscripts, and that in course 
of time they took pride in beautiful illuminations for capital 
letters, and sometimes whole pages. 

This work was performed in all parts of Europe, but in 
some respects reached its greatest perfection in Ireland, 
where the traditional interlacing coils of Celtic art lent them- 
selves most appropriately to such decoration. We certainly 
do not know definitely how many books were copied by monks 
and how many by others; probably there has sometimes been 
a tendency to exaggerate the part taken by religious, espe- 
cially during the later Middle Ages when not infrequently 


* Kingsford, Grey Friars of London; British Society of Franciscan 
Studies, VI, pp. 202-203. 


MONASTIC ART 237 


their interest in scholarship so decreased as to cause them to 
dispose of their libraries. 

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Jesuits 
came near forming at that late date a truly monastic archi- 
tecture by their well known fondness for the Barocco style, 
a form of Classic that made much of queer shells, festoons, 
and waving scrolls disposed so as to form a framework for 
such painting over roof and wall as Rubens loved to carry 
out. In atmosphere it was completely different from any- 
thing that convents ever knew before. 

Though not, of course, confined to the Jesuits—there are, 
in fact, plenty of Protestant examples—such work in their 
hands at one time bid fair in almost every quarter of the 
globe to lay the foundations of a truly conventual style, and 
it is much to be regretted that the order has now abandoned 
it for very ordinary Gothic in most of its newer fabrics, as 
at Milwaukee, Cincinnati, and St. Louis. In a new country 
especially, the stately and impressive Classic style that is 
exemplified in so many of the old Jesuit colleges, would seem 
to have possibilities that can never be supplied by forms that 
reached their perfection, and then naturally died, as the hfe 
of medixvalism ebbed away. 

No style of monastic art was ever destined to appear; the 
monk was too much tied up with his fellows for anything of 
the kind to be possible, but all art would be very much poorer 
without the contributions that the religious have made. 


BIBLIOGRAPHY: 


Nearly all works on art in all its branches are discreet enough 
to steer clear of the question as to what has been contributed 
by the convent and the world. There is an excellent, well illus- 
trated work in two volumes, Architecture Monastique, by M. 
Albert Lenoir, published at Paris, in 1852, but it is very un- 
critical and includes many buildings that were certainly never 
monastic at all. 

There is a good article, Architecture Monastique, in Violet le 
Due’s Dictionnaire Raisonné, 1845. Mackenzie E. C. Walcott’s 


238 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


Church Work and Life in English Minsters, 2 vols.; ambitious 
but inaccurate. 

English Monasteries by Prof. Hamilton Thompson, who has pub- 
lished many monastic articles of great value besides editing Visi- 
tations of Religious Houses, diocese Lincoln. Lecture syllabus 
Fen Life and Buildings by D. H. S. Cranage (Cambridge 

Nniv.). 

Many excellent accounts of individual abbeys and priories exist. 
There may be specially mentioned; Prof. Willis, The Architectural 
History of the Conventual Buildings of Christ Church in Can- 
terbury (Kent Archeological Society); Sir William St. John 
Hope, Fountains Abbey (Yorkshire Archeological Society), has an 
extremely fine historical ground plan. A. W. Clapham F-.S.A. 
Architecture of Premonstratensians, Archeologia, Vol. LX XIII, 
pp. 117-148. 

Very suggestive is Some Famous Buildings and their Story by 
A. W. Clapham & W. H. Godfrey. Ch. V. Friars as Builders, 
pp. 241-267. 


CHAPTER XVI 


THE DECLINE OF THE GREAT MEDIAVAL 
ORDERS 


It is impossible not to feel that just as the medieval 
system rose with monasticism, so in the later years of the 
Middle Ages it was the regulars that heralded the decay of 
that momentous and, on the whole, splendid period of history. 

Generally speaking, it appears to have been the case that 
throughout the Middle Ages monks living in the country 
were popular with their neighbours, but those that dwelt in 
cities were not infrequently disliked. A very long letter 
which Peter the Venerable wrote to S. Bernard (p. 135) in 
reply to Cistercian charges against the Cluniac order, em- 
phatically and confidently justifies monasteries holding lands 
on the ground that monks treated their serfs far better than 
did lay lords: “Now monks, although they do own such things 
treat them not similarly but in a very different way. 

“They use only the lawful and proper services of the vil- 
leins for the conveniences of life; they do not worry them 
with unlawful exactions; they impose no intolerable burdens 
upon them. If they see that they are in want they help them 
from their own property. Serfs and handmaidens they hold 
not as such but as brothers and sisters.” * 

This claim seems certainly, on the whole, to have been 
very well founded. The failings of Chaucer’s monk are not 
such as to make him disliked either by the serfs belonging to 
his abbey or by his country neighbours. The suppression 


1 Epist. Lib. II, Bp. xxviii; Migne, P.L. 189, col. 146. 
239 


240 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


of the great Northern abbeys of England caused the pilgrim- 
age of grace; at Bayham and elsewhere in the South, the 
country people attempted by force to prevent the ejection of — 
the religious. Certainly, as a general rule, the monks were 
kindly as landlords and friendly as neighbours. 

In cities, conditions were different. Monks were often 
~ unpopular even in places that owed their existence to the pres- © 
ence of the convent. Feeling that they were trustees and had 
no right to give away what belonged to God and holy Church, 
the religious were extremely slow to grant charters permit- 
ting the townspeople to manage their own affairs, and this 
put them at a great disadvantage with rivals more fortu- 
nately situated. 

At Norwich there were several fights between the citizens 
and the monks, one of which (in 1272) was exceedingly 
serious, involving much destruction of property and a num- 
ber of deaths. At Bury 8S. Edmund’s may still be seen a 
gateway behind whose statues are loop-holes for arrows so 
that the figures of saints could defend their church by being 
pushed down onto assailants with flights of arrows to follow. 
At Sherborne there was perpetual friction between town 
and cowl about the use of the common church, and the glo- 
rious late Gothic work that still'survives is owed to the dis- 
graceful events which Leland thus chronicles under the date 
1436. 

“The body of the abbay chirch dedicate to our Lady servid 
ontille a hundrith yeres syns for the chife paroche chirch 
of the town. This was the cause of the abolition of the 
paroche chirch there. 

“The monkes and the townes men felle at variance by 
cause the townes men took privilege to use the sacrament of 
baptism in the chapelle of Alhalowes. Whereapon one 
Walter Gallor, a stoute bucher, dwelling in Shirburn, de- 
facid clene the font-stone and after the variance growing to 
a playne sedition and the townesmenne by the meanes of an 


DECLINE OF THE MEDIAVVAL ORDERS 241 


erle of Huntendune, lying yn those quarters and taking the 
townes-mennes part, and the bishop of Saresbyri (Salisbury) 
the monkes part, a prest of Alhalowes shot a shaft with fier 
into the toppe of that part of St. Marys chirch that divided 
the Est part that the monkes usid, from that the townes-men 
usid ; and this partition chauncing at that tyme to be thakkid 
yn the rofe was sette afire and consequently al the hole chirch, 
the lede and belles meltid, was defacid.” 

So a nearly complete rebuilding had to be undertaken. 

It can hardly be taken as merely accidental that while 
Chaucer describes a saintly and ideal parish priest and a 
good earnest clerk of Oxford who kept books beside his bed, 
his friar is a rascal, self-seeking, unscrupulous and mean; 
his monk a luxurious, sport-loving country geneleman, in- 
clined to laugh at the founder of his own order, and his nun 
a coquettish and dainty lady, making little serious attempt to 
keep any rule. 

The summoner and pardoner indeed were worse than any 
of the monastic characters—or come to that any of the rest— 
but it is impossible to read the “Prologue” without feeling 
that in the middle of the fourteenth century medizval 
monasticism had seen its best days. ‘This impression is 
enhanced by the writings of Chaucer’s contemporaries, Lang- 
land (Piers Plowman) and Wyckliffe, even making the full- 
est allowances for the fact that both were avowedly hostile 
to friars. 

William of Wykeham, Bishop of Winchester, in his stat- 
utes for his colleges at Winchester and Oxford (1400), 
recites that a diligent examination of the various rules of 
the religious orders and a comparison of the lives of their 
several professors does not anywhere reveal that the ordi- 
nances of their founders, according to their true design and 
intention, are at present being observed by any of them. 

Even at a much earlier time, during the thirteenth century, 
it is difficult to avoid the conclusion from existing remains 


) 


242 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


that life in a monastery must have been more materially com- 
fortable than life in a castle or manor house. No contem- 
porary dwelling of laymen that has survived can compare 
for solid comfort with the well-preserved domestic buildings 
of Fountains Abbey, dating mostly from the thirteenth cen- 
tury. Archeological evidence entirely confirms 8S. Bernard’s 
complaints (p. 186) and that in houses of his own order. 
Bodiam castle in Sussex, which was built about 1386 by Sir 
Edward Dalyngruge, after some time spent in France, and 
which is largely a pioneer in the domestic comfort of forti- 
fied country mansions, is hardly so pleasant a dwelling. 

And in later medizval years very numerous bishops’ regis- 
ters in their accounts of monastic visitations, give a truly 
terrible picture of the general state of religion as sometimes 
practised by the monks. As a rule, the smaller the house 
and the fewer monks it contained, the less efforts there were 
apt to be to maintain the rule of the order. 

This 8. Benedict had foreseen (p. 78) and S. Bernard in 
his letter to the Abbot of an Alpine abbey refers to “syna- 
gogues of Satan, that is little cells outside the cenobium 
where three or four brothers live without either order or 
rule.” * A very good example is the Priory of S. Peter, at 
Sele in Sussex, which when visited by Bishop Praty (of 
Chichester) in 1441 contained but three monks besides the 
Prior, and he had secured his office by simony and was 
guilty of gross immorality. He neglected the services and 
wasted the resources of the house.® 

In the larger houses such irregularities were far more 
rare. A considerable body of men living together will be 
less easily induced to ignore the rule than only two or three. 
But what is perhaps more impressive than any actual cor- 

2p. CCLIV; Migne, P.L. 182, col. 459. 

*The chartulary of this priory was edited in 1923, by my friend L. F. 
Salzman, F.S.A., from a MS. belonging to Magdalen College, Oxford, 


which secured the property of the house in 1480, despite the resistance 
of a sole surviving monk. 


DECLINE OF THE MEDIAVAL ORDERS 243 


ruption is that fact that although very few monasteries were 
founded after the thirteenth century (but see p. 116), those 
that existed were not far from empty long before the dissolu- 
tion in England. 

At Ely, apparently, there were but twenty-five monks when 
a dean with secular chapter was substituted for the monastic 
body.* At the other large abbeys things were much the same, 
Some had virtually become rather aristocratic clubs and in 
any case the number seeking admission was much smaller 
than in earlier days. Stephen Hawes, in his learned but 
crabbed allegory the “Pastime of Pleasure,” * has his hero, 
Grand Amoure, after passing through the fair meadow of 
youth, choose the way of active life in preference to 
monasticism. 

There is any quantity of evidence that such views were 
practically universal at the time. More in his “Utopia” 
scores the conduct of “certain abbots, holy men no doubt.” 
Erasmus in his letters is exceedingly biting. The monk does 
not lead an honest and sober life, still less does he care for 
industry or learning; so long as he is the slave of a superior 
as worthless as himself, he is within his holy obedience. 
Erasmus himself was singularly unfitted to the profession 
into which he had been forced. 

We cannot help feeling that there was some personal 
resentment when he scornfully referred to monastic stability 
as living the life of a sponge. There is absolutely no need 
to go for evidence to those who accepted the Reformation. 

Monasticism had lost its ancient popularity and the diffi-. 
culties of dissolution were greatly lessened by the relatively 
small number of monks to be dispossessed. This would 
never be suspected from any inspection of the ruins that 
remain. Building continued in great vigour up to the very 
end. In fact when the dissolution was feared there was a 


4See Coulton, Five Centuries of Religion, I, 252. 
5 Printed by Wynkyn de Worde, 1509. 


244 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


tendency to spend all spare cash in building, that there 
might be nothing to tempt the cupidity of a reformer. 

Thus at Fountains the noble tower was hardly finished 
when the house was destroyed. At Bolton a similar work 
was only just begun, and still stands as the Augustinian 
canons left it four hundred years ago.® 

Yet the suppression of the monasteries by Henry VIII in 
England, Ireland, and Wales must be stamped for all time 
one of the most iniquitous episodes in the national history. 
The very act that suppressed the smaller houses thanks God 
that in the great and solemn monasteries of the realm relli- 
gion was right well served. The king’s commissioners were 
very obviously animated by other motives than reforming 
zeal, 

The letter of the visitors to Glastonbury, dated September 
22, 1539, rather naively illustrates their general point of 
view: ‘We assure your lordship it is the goodliest house of 
that sort that ever we have seen. We would that your lord- 
ship did know it as we do; then we doubt not but your lord- 
ship would judge it a house meet for the king’s majesty, and 
for no man else. Yours to command, Richard Pollard, 
Thomas Moyle, Richard Layton.” 

Miserable fate to overtake the ‘‘city which once was the 
Fountain and the original of all Religion, built by Christ’s 
disciples, consecrated by Christ Himself; and this place is 
the mother of Saints.” 7 
_ Some of the monastic property was indeed well used. Six 
great abbeys, instead of being suppressed, were made the 
cathedrals of new dioceses: Westminster (which had but one 
bishop), Chester, Bristol, Gloucester, Peterborough, and 


* Finchale is one of the exceedingly rare examples of a church reduced 
in size during the Middle Ages, and this was owing to the policy of the 
monks of Durham to reduce to insignificance all the dependent priories. 

™Fuller, Church History of Britain, I, 98, quoting Ina’s charter and 
other old authorities that go beyond the original legend about 8S. Joseph 
of Arimathea and the thorn. 


DECLINE OF THE MEDLZVAL ORDERS 245 


S. Frideswide’s, Oxford. Money employed for coast de- 
fence and the building of ships was at least for national 
purposes, but nothing can ever excuse or palliate the way in 
which a blackguard king granted to a set of rascally favour- 
ites, property, which devoted to education or hospitals would 
have been a benefit to mankind right up to the present hour. 

On the Continent the path of suppression was greatly 
smoothed by the iniquitous system of commendatory abbots; 
that is, granting the headship to a man whose only interest 
was the pocketing of the abbatial revenues. It began as 
early as the sixth or seventh century and gradually increased 
so as to threaten to undermine the whole monastic system. 
In England, Wolsey was nearly the only example, and he 
showed great foresight in using monastic property that came 
under his control for the founding of his school at Ipswich, 
of which nothing but a gateway survives, and his college at 
Oxford, whose chapel is the cathedral of the diocese. The 
Dutch rather later used funds from the Abbey of Egmont 
to found the famous university of Leyden. 

If many of the English monks showed themselves rather 
disappointingly willing to hand over their property to the 
king’s commissioners it must always be remembered that 
there were stout martyrs among them who refused to do any- 
thing of the kind. The monks of the London Charterhouse 
showed a heroism worthy of the best traditions of their order. 

Monasticism was indeed to survive the era that it had 
done so much in earlier centuries to create, yet despite a 
brilliant new period of Benedictine learning, the orders that 
chiefly flourished before the coming of the friars were to give 
place to newer forms. Their sun had not set, yet their noon- 
tide glory was past. It was to be the friars and orders 
entirely new that should carry on the traditions of asceticism 
into the life of the modern world. 


246 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


BIBLIOGRAPHY: 


This part of the story of monasticism is of course exceedingly 
familiar from the writings of Froude, Pollock, and other scholars 
who have made the period their own. It is not specially sig- 
nificant from the standpoint of the present book; no one seriously 
supposes that the mediswval orders were making much contri- 
bution to civilization in the early sixteenth century. Among 
very numerous works on the monasteries at the time, or earlier, 
are Dugdale, Monasticon Anglicanum, which is of course a mine 
of information on the whole subject; published originally 1655- 
1678, edition (8 vols.) 1817-1830, has in addition to the Latin 
original an account of each house in English. The Rites of 
Durham, 1598, reissued by the Surtees Society about 1845, de- 
scribes the cathedral priory just before its dissolution. 

Jessopp, Before the Great Pillage. Gairdner, The Church in 
the Sixteenth Century. Calendar of State Papers of Henry 
VITT, 1527-1540. Cardinal Gasquet, English Monastic Life; Henry 
VIII, and the English Monasteries (describes things very much 
as they should have been). Letters Relating to the Suppression 
of Monasteries, published by the Camden Society, 1848. Spel- 
man, History and Fate of Sacrilege. 


CHAPTER XVII 
JESUITS AND LATER ORDERS 


The Renaissance marked the triumph of materialism. It 
was not vulgar materialism. Quite on the contrary, it was 
perhaps the most cultured, esthetic, and altogether brilliant 
materialism that the world has ever known. 

But it was materialism nevertheless. It was concerned 
with building palaces rather than churches. It began to 
paint actual life rather than conventional Madonnas, or if 
it painted or sculptured prophets or saints, it did so in a 
most pagan way. Instead of the superb idealism of Dante, 
_ whose works may be considered a splendid epitaph of dying 
medievalism, the literature of the Renaissance culminated 
in the throbbing life of Shakespeare’s plays. 

The period remade science. It discovered continents. Its 
humanism displayed a new interest in every side of life. 
Very largely it ceased to be interested in death that for so 
many centuries had appeared the chief concern of man. It 
delighted in displaying contempt for medizval ideals. 

Unfortunately it had none of its own. Machiavelli repre- 
sented its ethics; Cervantes and Rabelais its general spirit; 
More’s “Utopia” its rather impracticable cravings for a com- 
plete breach with the past. The monk-reared civilization of 
its fathers was voted a badly outworn thing. 

By far the greater number of monasteries were suppressed, 
first in the British Isles, then in all the lands that accepted 
the Reformation, eventually in nearly all that did not. 
Cleared of all mere verbiage, the reason was everywhere the 
same; a material age imagined that it had got beyond an 

247 


248 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


outworn ideal. That in no small measure medieval monasti- 
cism had outlived its usefulness will scarcely be seriously 
denied, but it has yet to be shown that the diversion of so 
huge an inheritance—or at least its greater part—into pri- 
vate hands has benefited the human race. 

Despite the fact that the culture of the Renaissance was a 
very real thing, the destruction of monasteries was accom- 
panied by one of the most shocking annihilations of manu- 
scripts that the world has ever seen. It was in England but 
a small remnant that Archbishop Parker salvaged for the 
library of Corpus Christi College at Cambridge.? 

Monasticism, it seemed very clear, was to be numbered 
with the enthusiasms of the past. Anything more hope 
lessly out of touch with the spirit of the Renaissance it would 
be utterly impossible to find. Humanism was the very 
antithesis of the old spirit of the desert. They nowhere 
touched at all. 

And yet, in spite of everything, asceticism was once again 
to assert its well-nigh inextinguishable power. The Basques 
of Spain, a very ancient race but little known to fame, were 
to rear a great world leader, and from their barren hills 
another order rose which in the words of its German his- 
torian: ‘‘at once not only threw totally into the shade all 
previous monkish brotherhoods, but which accomplished more 
in a single century than the whole of them put together had 
effected during the long period of their existence.” ? 

This is greatly exaggerated and seems rather to display 
confusion as to the work of monasticism in the history of 
the Church and of the world, but there is a strong substratum 
of truth in the remark. 


* Notwithstanding, the bad work of dispersing monastic libraries had 
been begun by the religious themselves. They had for centuries ceased 
to be the guardians of literature that had earlier been one of their chief 
titles to fame. 

*The Jesuits, a Complete History, by Theodore Griesinger, tr. by A. J. 
Scott. London, 1883. Vol. I, p. 5. 


JESUITS AND LATER ORDERS 249 


The story of S. Ignatius (1495-1556) is not very unlike 
that of many other monastic saints. Brave, chivalrous, popu- 
lar, and true, perhaps a little fast, like all young Spaniards 
of that day, Charles V, Emperor and Spanish king, had no 
more loyal officer in his struggle with the king of France, 
Francis I. 

Heroically assisting in the defence of Pamplona till he 
was disabled by wounds, he hung for many months between 
life and death at the family seat of Loyola. Had that feudal 
tower been well supplied with what was then his favourite 
literature, such as is now remembered chiefly in its deathless 
parody, the ‘““Adventures of Don Quixote,” it is possible that 
Ignatius would be unknown to fame. But as no tales of 
errant knights were to be found, he was supplied with some 
religious works, including particularly a life of Christ by 
a German Carthusian named Ludolf (p. 119). 

When at last he was better, though slightly crippled for 
life, he had turned his thoughts to higher things. The 
Blessed Virgin had displaced his rather misty knightly lady 
love; he had found another Master than Charles V. 

Despite the very slight encouragement he received from 
his family, he turned his steps to the cliff-perched Benedic- 
tine house of Montserrat, and in its chapel like the good 
knights of old he hung his arms and watched all night, vow- 
ing himself to the service of God and holy Church. 

His singular career of monk-errantry had begun. FPil- 
grimaging to Palestine he visited with the most fervent 
devotion the places made sacred by the earthly footsteps of 
our Lord, and he planned to attempt the task of converting 
the Turks with no further equipment than enthusiasm; for 
he knew no language but his own, he was ill-versed in Chris- 
tian theology, and of that of Islam he knew nothing at all. 

He was somewhat coldly received by the Franciscan 
brothers at Jerusalem, who, dwelling on sufferance amid a 
fanatic people, were fearful of the result of his indiscrimi- 


250 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


nate zeal. Drifting back to Spain, he had at least discov- 
ered that without education almost nothing could be done, 
and so at Alcala he studied the elements of Latin. There 
the dashing officer of former years sat upon the same benches 
with little boys and begged their common master not to spare 
the rod on himself in any case where he would have used it 
on the meanest of the rest. 

Efforts to do missionary work among the poor, and some- 
times among the rich, got Ignatius into trouble with the 
Inquisition, and never did that asinine tribunal give a more 
singular proof of its ineptitude to the world than in its treat- 
ment of the stoutest champion that the Church should ever 
have. Its authorities displayed little discretion and no pro- 
phetic insight at all. He showed the most devoted submis- 
sion, but eventually retreated to Salamanca. As at this seat 
of learning the same things happened again, Ignatius turned 
his back on his native land and set off on foot despite tumult 
and war to pursue his studies in the broader atmosphere of 
the capital of France. 

In Paris, despite the prevalence of Calvinistic views, or 
perhaps very largely because of it, Ignatius found a few 
like-minded with himself. His studies progressed better 
than in Spain, but evidently his intensely religious mind, 
with its earnest communing with its God, found the very 
utmost difficulty in such concentration as alone can win 
honours in a university course. 

On a warm summer’s day, August 15, 1534, on the his- 
toric hill called Montmartre, which was then a few miles out 
from the fair city of Paris, in a little chapel connected with 
the story of S. Denis, the patron of the great abbey not far 
off, knelt seven men through long and pregnant hours. The 
Parisians were completely uninterested, yet even in such a 
city as their own few more momentous happenings have had 
place. 

The only one of the little band in holy orders, Faber by 


JESUITS AND LATER ORDERS 251 


name, administered the Sacrament to all the rest. The most 
famous were Francis Xavier and Ignatius himself. When 
at length they returned to the daylight they had founded 
what perhaps was to prove itself the greatest monastic com- 
pany that ever was, dedicated A(d) M(aiorem) D(ei) 
G(loriam) in the particular name of I.H.S. 

After wandering to Venice in the hope of reaching Pales- 
tine, and taking up the task of converting the Turks, the 
little band, kept out of Asia by the unceasing wars, devoted 
itself to work among lepers and other outcasts in Venice; 
then at Rome decided to place its whole fortunes at the dis- 
posal of the Pope for such tasks as he might direct. . 

The Society of Jesus was fully entered upon its wonderful | 
career. 

This Company represents the climax of a tendency long 
evident in monastic history. Originally the object of asceti- 
cism was to save the soul of the monk—nothing else. The 
rule of S. Benedict contemplated no other aim, Chrode- 
gang, of Metz, in the institution of canons, displayed a desire 
to utilize the efficiency of monasticism to improve the secular 
clergy. The friars took upon themselves definite duties 
towards the people, but still the main emphasis was on the 
living in poverty for the benefit of their own souls. 

The Jesuits are frankly instituted to do a great work in 
the world. The emphasis is upon nothing else. The charter 
does not mention the salvation of the members of the order, 
but is keenly concerned with the work they have to do. 

‘Whoever will, as a soldier of God in our Company upon 
which we have bestowed the name of Jesus, fight under the 
banner of the Cross, and serve God and His representative 
on earth, the Pope of Rome, after having in the most solemn 
manner taken the vow of chastity, must always recollect that 
he now belongs to a Company which has been instituted 
simply and solely in order to perfect in the souls of men the 
teaching and dissemination of Christianity as also to pro- 


252 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


mulgate the true faith by means of the public preaching of 
God’s word, by holy exercises and macerations, by works of 
love, and especially by the education of the young.” 

“Tt shall be for the general alone, whom we shall elect, to 
have the right of assigning to each his grade and duties. * * * 
The general shall draw up a constitution, and on all impor- 
tant points shall convoke all the members of the society or 
as many as can conveniently gather in order to get their 
advice.” 

The duty of absolute obedience both to the Pope and the 
general is very strongly emphasized. All members of the 
society who are priests must say the offices privately and not 
in common, like monks in cloister. 

The general corruption of the monastic orders was such 
that objections to authorizing a new one were of the strongest 
kind. The admirable Cardinal Guidiccioni, “the glory and 
honour of Lucea,”’ was very emphatic on this point and for 
some time he would not even read the papers connected with 
the Jesuits. 

Pope Paul III was of quite a different opinion and on 
reading the proposed charter he is alleged to have exclaimed: 
“The finger of God.is here!” Eventually all objections were 
overcome; the needs of the Church were obviously great. 
The new monastic order seemed likely to dash into an ever- 
broadening gap. 

So on September 27, 1540, the charter was incorporated 
into a bull, and immunities of the widest kind were con- 
ferred upon the Company of Jesus. The rights of bishops 
and even of universities were largely subordinated to its 
privileges. 

The aim of the society was very largely to stem the cur- 
rents of the age and to counteract the forces of the Renais- 
sance. A fine beginning was made in the work immediately 
undertaken among the prostitutes and other unfortunates of 
Rome. In one respect the spirit of the age was very fully 


JESUITS AND LATER ORDERS 253 


recognized. ‘The organization was made autocratic and mili- 
tary. The democracy of the older orders was cast aside. 
No chapter house was needed in a Jesuit convent. The con- 
stitution itself was promulgated by the general in 1552, 
without any ratification from the members. Unlike the 
earlier charter, it speaks of the “‘salvation of our own souls,” 
but this is not prominent. 

It is impossible not to feel that in the story of the Com- 
pany of Jesus we are treading on new soil. Egypt is left 
behind and that for the first time. In the society of most 
founders of orders and particularly the most prominent, such 
as Benedict and Francis of Assisi, the desert monk would 
have felt very perfectly at home. With their great ideals he 
could not but sympathize; in their language he would have 
recognized his own. The general atmosphere of monasticism, 
despite the strong side-winds of the Roman spirit and of 
feudalism, persists from Paul to Thomas 4 Kempis, and 
indeed beyond. 

But what could the desert hermit make of a monastic 
legislator whose motto, inscribed beneath his statue in the 
Gest: at Rome, was: “I came to set fire to the earth and how 
can I be content until it has burst into flame?’ * The words 
might fittingly indeed have been engraved upon a monument 
to Napoleon or Cesar, but to a solitary of the Thebaid they 
would have seemed the furthest possible remove from any- 
thing he ought to want to do. Monasticism has travelled 
very far from the days when of S. Benedict it could be said: 
“He looked at the world and he scorned it.” 4 

And in the whole literature of Jesuitism we are conscious 
that monasticism is speaking in terms completely new. What 
else indeed would be possible in the era during which it was 
born? What conceivable contact could the Renaissance have 


*“Tonem veni mettere in terram, et quid volo nisi ut accendatur?” 
‘“Inspewit et despewit,’ carved on the old Roman tower at Monte 
Cassino. 


254 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


had with the renunciation of the world? Even S. Ignatius 
could not get away from the spirit of his age, much as he 
found in it to condemn. 

His character indeed is singularly complex. On one side 
is a complete medizvalism, facing the past in the spirit of a 
dreamy mystic; on the other the most practical man of a 
practical age, the only one who really saw on what lines 
the Church’s power might be restored. History knows no 
stronger combination than that of the seer and the prac- 
tical statesman combined. Columbus was another such in 
Loyola’s own age. And Ignatius would never dissipate 
his energy. He cared no more than Luther for all the 
culture of the Renaissance. Before Pamplona the keenest 
of soldiers; afterwards the keenest and most practical of 
monks.® 

A first-rate scholar he was not. Though he lived in Rome 
he never mastered the Italian language and mixed it with 
Spanish words. None of his ideas was particularly new. 
Yet he stands forth one of the great geniuses of all history, 
and no one ever succeeded more completely in the work to 
which he put his hand. He may be said to have brought 
military efficiency to the service'of religion, and from his 
own personality and the fervent spirit he was able to instil 
into his followers, he probably improved upon the military 
organization of that day. 

He invariably worked with constituted authority, never 
in opposition to it. He once told his secretary, Polanco, 
whose writings are a chief authority for early Jesuit history, 
that in recruits he looked for business ability and firmness 
of character rather than for purely natural goodness. 

Yet Ignatius himself was a man of prayer as much as any 
of the saints of old, and on one occasion, when disturbed at 


5 Technically, of course, Jesuits are clerks regular, but monk is being 
used more and more for religious of any kind. Even Franciscans and 
Dominicans use the term of themselves, but most inaccurately. 


JESUITS AND LATER ORDERS 255 


his devotions by a messenger bearing a budget of letters 
from his family, he ordered the whole lot to be tossed into the 
fire unread (p. 33). He very fully realized the absolute 
necessity of restoring to the hearts of individuals the unques- 
tioning faith of medieval years. 

Ignatius stands forth in history the very incarnation 
of the organizing spirit of Rome, no less so from his non- 
Roman birth. Pagan or Christian, Rome has ever known 
how to use men of every race. First in the domain of gen- 
eral culture, and later on of faith, Latin civilization had but 
little contribution for the general store of men; in both cases 
it was mainly the Greeks by whom such original inspirations 
were supplied. 

But Rome used the conceptions that she found elsewhere; 
she made them the common property of the then known 
world ; she took her own place as the summit, the organizing 
spirit, the directing force of all. So Ignatius identified the 
interests of his company with those of the Latin Church with 
all its imperial traditions. He could do no otherwise. He 
would take no other capital than Rome. 

He had no need to mould a faith, but he built up one of 
the most efficient organizing forces that the world has ever 
known. Sprung from a little people, he knew no limitations 
of nation, clime or race. The great society he built has 
never been influenced by any local bonds; has never claimed 
any allegiance narrower than that of the world. He is one 
of the chiefest in the long line of statesmen who have re- 
furbished the time-honoured methods of Rome. The empire 
of Augustus and Charles the Great he reared anew, but in 
far other form. 

He stands the only genius of the foremost rank upon the - 
Papal side during the storms of the Renaissance. Had he 
not lived, it is quite possible that no other would have done 
his work. He infused new life into what had seemed like 
dying medievalism. His enduring monument in large de- 


256 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


gree is the modern Church of Rome. It is not a faith apt 
to lack champions in all days of stress and strain. 

The confidence of successive Popes in his great society 
has been abundantly justified. Jt may well be doubted if 
in the whole course of history any other society has so en- 
tirely, so brilliantly, and so triumphantly carried out the 
designs of its founder. In restoring the prestige and the 
power of the Papacy since the shattering blows dealt by 
the Reformation, no other force has taken anything ap- 
proaching the same part. Extraordinary influence has 
been gained over the politics of every land from Portugal 
to Poland. 

No medieval order ever had anything like such long 
continued power. Vast areas of Europe have been won back 
to the fold of the Church of Rome, particularly within 
the limits of the old dual monarchy. Great numbers of 
heathen have been converted. New altars have been reared 
under every sky. A great educational work has been car- 
ried out. A striking form of Renaissance architecture has 
been fostered. 

There have been times when the general at Rome has 
been one of the most powerful men on earth, largely con- 
trolling the policy of many great European states, ruling 
in sovereignty a vast South American dominion (p. 185), 
directing a world-wide commerce and also a mission and 
educational work that seem vast even according to the stand- 
ards of the America of the present day. The methods of 
the society indeed have at times perhaps resembled those of 
the wily Ulysses. 

The company has indeed aroused antagonisms of the 
fiercest kind both within and without the Church, nor would 
any deny that at times its morality has been influenced by 
the standards of the Renaissance, but the often repeated 
charge that Jesuitism justifies any methods to achieve its 
ends seems to rest, so far as documentary evidence is con- 


JESUITS AND LATER ORDERS 257 


cerned, merely upon a single passage of a by no means prom- 
inent member.® 

Jt has been said and frequently repeated that in its iron 
discipline the company of Jesus has bred no first-class mind 
since its very earliest days. This seems certainly rather to 
ignore the heroic missionaries and explorers who first seri- 
ously began the task of introducing the Far East to the 
West, of taming the American wilds and exploring no in- 
significant portion of Africa. But there has been a strong 
tendency for some of the very greatest minds that the society 
ever trained to break away in various directions, such as 
Descartes, Voltaire, Pascal. 

In 1773 the society was suppressed by Clement XIV, as - 
the result of a widespread demand from many of the Roman 
Catholic countries of Europe, whose objection was directed 
chiefly to its political activities. Only in Protestant Prussia 
and Orthodox Russia could any refuge be found and the 
motives of Frederick the Great and Catherine II were cer- 
tainly not sympathy with the religious doctrines of the exiled 
fathers.* 

In the first decade of the nineteenth century the society’ 
was restored, largely owing to the alarm felt at the 
spread of liberal principles and the feeling that no or- 
ganization was better fitted to cope with the movement. 
Again it spread its churches and missions throughout the 
world, and planted many colleges in all parts of the United 
States. 

The Company of Jesus has played a part in Europe hardly 


*Busembaum, “Cui licitus est finis etiam licent media,” Paris, 1729, 
p- 584; or Lib. VI. Tract vi., cap. ii., De sacramentis, dubium vu. The 
by no means impressive instances of a lack of candour in the founder 
himself are treated with great care by his most recent biographer, H. D. 
Sedgwick. 

The details of the political activities of the Jesuits in the different 
countries seem hardly in place in such a work as the present. Portugal 
provided in John JII, their first royal patron, and later in Pombal 
their arch-enemy. Bohemia was probably the European country in 
which they achieved their most permanent success. 


258 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


inferior in importance to that of the monks of old, but there 
is this most important difference. Instead of helping to 
rebuild a secular civilization destroyed by the collapse of a 
régime, it has chiefly sought to influence in the interests 
_ of its own Church the institutions that it found in posses- 
sion. No one has ever claimed that the society has done 
during the period of the Renaissance what Benedictinism 
so gloriously achieved during the early Middle Ages. So- 
ciety was no longer so plastic as might have made possible 
anything of the kind. 

Although by far the most important, the Jesuits were by 
no means the only religious order that arose in the sixteenth 
century. The Theatrines, founded by Gaetano di Thiene 
and Pietro Caraffa, were instituted with a very similar 
ideal. The members were to live on what was voluntarily 
offered them without even begging, and to set such an exam- 
ple of deep spirituality to the secular clergy as to raise the 
whole tone of the Church. 

Caraffa showed the spirit of a saint—or as some might 
prefer to put it, of a true sportsman—when as Paul IV, 
he gave the strongest support to the Jesuits, though at one 
time he had probably hoped to enlist Ignatius as a member 
of his own order. Other orders founded during the six- 
teenth century include the Barnabites by S. A. M. Zac- 
caria, the Brothers Hospitallers by S. John of God, and the 
better known Oratorians, an order established by S. Philip 
Neri, which in 1847 was introduced into England by New- 
man. 

Nothing can better illustrate the master mind of S. Igna- 
tius than the fact that his own company dominates all the 
rest as a forest oak overshadows the woodland flowers, and 
this despite the fact that the founder of the Theatrines 
became the sovereign Pontiff. 

The religious revival under Archbishop Laud and others 
during the early part of the seventeenth century re-intro- 


JESUITS AND LATER ORDERS 259 


duced monasticism into the English Church, but this did not 
survive the civil war.® 

Since the Oxford Movement, a number of new Anglican: 
orders, English and American, both for monks and nuns, 
have been called into being.® Like the very numerous new 
orders in the Church of Rome, all are designed to carry on 
some special task, such as preaching, teaching, nursing, em- 
broidery, or mission work. Kven today monastic ideals are 
far from being outworn, but they only slightly concern a 
study of the influence asceticism has exerted on the general 
story of mankind. 

In the fifth century European civilization was prostrated 
under the rude shock of endless, futile war. Monks built it 
up anew. In the twentieth century the condition of Europe 
is not so very different. What force can do such work today 
as monks so well did then? The monk at least can teach 
us this. All work that shall ever bear the test of time must 
be founded, not on hatred but on love. The days when 
monks could rule the world are numbered with the well re- 
membered bygone years. But the spirit of Basil and Bene- 
dict, Bernard and Francis of Assisi is a heritage that we 
cannot afford to let die. Even if we did, our children would 
find it again. For of each great monk, as of Shakespeare, it 
is true: 


“He was not of an age, but for all time.” 


BIBLIOGRAPHY: 


The chief authority for the life of S. Ignatius Loyola is Vita 
Ignatii Loyole et rerum Societatis Jesu Historia; by Joannes 
A. de Polanco, the saint’s secretary, 1547-1556. 

The sources, mostly printed in Monumenta Soctetatis Jesu, 
Madrid, are set out in the best modern life: Ignatius Loyola, An 
Attempt at an Impartial Biography, by Henry Dwight Sedgwick, 


®A later convent was sponsored by Bishop Ken of Bath and Wells in 
the later seventeenth century. 

®In Fr. Figgis, of Cambridge, Anglican monasticism has produced 
a medieval scholar of the first rank. 


260 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM 


(Macmillan). This is an exceedingly satisfactory piece of 
work. 

A very interesting account, written from the standpoint of an 
ecstatic admirer and admirably illustrated with pen drawings is: 
St. Ignatius Loyola and the Early Jesuits, by Stewart Rose (Lady 
Buchan). 

More general works on the order are The Jesuits; a Complete 
History, by T. Griesinger, trans. by A. J. Scott, 2 vols.; very 
hostile, not well written. A Candid History of the Jesuits, by 
Joseph McCabe (an ex-Franciscan), hostile but fair. The Jesuits, 
1534-1921, by T. J. Campbell, S. J. (naturally very appreciative). 
History of the Jesuits to the Suppression by Clement XIV, by 
Andrew Steinmetz, 3 vols. 1848. 

Far more satisfactory is History of the Soctety of Jesus in 
North America, colonial and federal, by Thomas Hughes, S. J., 2 
vols. text and 2 vols. of original documents. This is a really 
scholarly work. 

For accounts of other orders the Catholic Encyclopedia seems 
on the whole the best general authority. For light on a rather 
obscure subject H. P. K. Skipton, Community Life in the Church 
of England since the Reformation, Church Quarterly Review, 
April, 1918. 


INDEX 


Aachen, 93, 120 

Abélard, 142, 146-148, 216 

Aberdeen, 99 

Abyssinia, 220 

Acre, 199, 201-202, 204 

Adalbero. Bp., 130, 137, 193 

Adalhard, 93 

Adamnan, 178 

Agapida, 211 

Ailred of Rievaulx, 114 

Akoimetai, 52 

Alban, S., 21 

Albany, N. Y., 225 

Alberic, 139-140 

Albert. Patriarch, 163 

Albigenses, 162, 196 

Alcala, 250 

-Alcantarines, 166 

Alcock. Bp., 217 

Alcuin, 93 

Alexander IV, 129-163 

Alexandria, 23, 26, 28 

Alfred the Great, 217 

All Souls, 131 

Alps, 94, 127, 129 

Alsace, 98 

Amesbury, 115 

Anacletus II, 144 

Angelico, Fra, 235 

Angilbert, 93 

Anglican religious orders, 259 

Anglicanism, 132 

Animals. Monastic friendship with, 
19-20, 30-31, 61, 64, 108, 178 

Ansa. Council of, 131 

Anselm, 213, 218 

Ansgar, 179 

Anthropomorphites, 27 

Antioch, 27, 49, 199 

Antony, Mark, 19 

Antony. S., 13, 14, 19-24 

Appennines, 117 

Apocrypha, 68 


261 


Aquinas, 218 

Aquitaine, 93, 123, 148 

Aragon, 201 

Archbius, 27 

Archdall, 109, 169 

Arians, 24, 58 

Aristotle, 218 

Arles, 133 

Armagh, 99, 120 

Armenia, 28, 51, 54, 99 

Ashford, 204 

Asia Minor, 39 

Assisi, 154 seqg., 168 

Asuncion, 186 

Athanasian Creed, 71 

Athanasius (Great), 21, 26, 28 

Athanasius of Mt. Athos, 54 

Athens, 39, 229 

Athos, 53-54, 189, 201 

Augustine of Canterbury. S., 179 

Augustine of Hippo. S., 61, 63, 
71, 81, 103, 147, 211 

Augustinian Canons, 97, 106, 135 

Augustinian Rule, 62-63 

Austin friars, 163 

Austria, 206 

Avignon, 116 


Bacon. Robert, 120 

Bacon, Roger, 205, 218 

Baldwin, 121 

Barbarossa. 
141 

Barbary Corsairs, 203 

Barbatianus, 95 

Barker. Ernest, 194, 197 

Barnabites, 258 

Barocco, 237 

Bartolommeo. Fra, 236 

Basil. 8., 39-48 

Baths, 80 

Battle Abbey, 84 

Baume, 124, 126 


Emperor, 113, 120, 


262 


Bayham Abbey, 240 
Bec, 233 


Bede. Venerable, 57, 111, 179, 186, 


210, 212 

Belisarius, 210 

Benedict (Great) S., Ch. IV, 74 
seq., 118, 127, 138, 219, 221, 253 

Benedict of Aniane. hy 93, 116 

Bernard of Clairvaux, S., 135, 
138-150, 153, 199, 218, 230 231 

Bernard of Menthon. S., 94 

Bernardine of Siena. Ss... 166 

Berno, 124, 126 

Bernold, 193 

Bertha, 57 

Beschi, 183 

Bethlehem, 32, 64, 67, 68 

Bingen, 112 

Birch. Gray, 31 

Bishop. Edmund, 95 

Boccaccio, 179, 211 

Boethius, 211 

Bollandists, 172, 221 

Bologna, 162, 194, 216 

Bolton, 244 

Bonaventura. S., 88, 166, 217 

Boniface. S., 179 

Boniface VIII, 179 

Brandan. §S., 102 

Bremen. Adam of, 211 

Brictio, sceptical about devils, 61 

Bridget of Kildare, S., 101 

Bridoul. Toussaint, S. J., 31 

Bridget of Upsala. 8., 116 

Brothers Hospitalers, 258 

Brown. Prof. Hume, 168 

Bruce. King Robert, 169 

Bruel, 137 

Bruno (Gregory V), 117 

Bruno (of Koln). S., 117 

Bryce. Viscount, 100 

Bryennios. Bp., 55 

Buchan. Lady, 260 

Buddha, Buddhist, 12, 23, 66, 128, 
155, 175, 211 

Bunyan, 121 

Burgundy, 117, 134, 138, 143 

Burns. Robert, 58 

Bury. Prof., 109 

Busembaum, 257 

Butler. Abbot, 38, 74, 83, 84, 85, 
89, 95 


INDEX 


Cedmon, 212 

Cesarius of Heisterbach, 98, 162 

Candida Casa, 57 

California, 181 

Calvin, 62 

Camaldulensian order, 117, 216 

Cambridge, 217, 233, 248 

Cambuskenneth, 194 

Camden Society, 246 

Camm, 122 

Campbell. T. J., 260 

Cancelli, 224-225 

Canne, 65 

Canterbury, 57, 85, 97, 119, 120, 
179, 188, 232 

Cappadocia, 39 

Capuchins, 166 

Carlisle, 97 

Carlyle. Thomas, 75, 192 

Carmel, Carmelite, 153, 162, 169, 
235 

Carmichael. Montgomery, 154 

Carrow, 114 

Carta Caritatis, 143 

Carthagena, 186 

Carthusians, 117-119, 235: 

Casa Grande, 185 

Casimir, 206 

Cassian, 22, 27, 28, 31-37, 70, 224 

Cassiodorus, 210, 236 

Cathari, 113 

Catholicism defined by S. Vincent, 
70 


Celano. Thomas of, 88, 155, 171 

Celtic Christianity, 83, 110-111 

Cervantes, 247 

Chalcedon. Council of, 51, 131- 
132 

Champeaux. William of, 147 

Chapel. Origin of word, 57 

Charles the Bald, 104 

Charles the Great (Charlemagne), 
92 

Charles V, 191, 203, 249 

Chartreuse, 117 (London Charter- 
house, 245) 

Chaucer, 23, 99, 114, 136, 156, 170, 
211, 239, 241 

Chester, 244 

Chichester, 120, 228 

China, 102, 173, 177, 181, 184, 220 

Choir stalls, 224-225 


INDEX 


Christ. Order of, 200 


Chrodegang. Archbishop, 94, 96, 
251 


Chrysostom. 8. John, 50 
Cinderella, 26 


Citeaux, Cistercian, Ch. IX, 199, 


221, 230 
Clairvaux, 143 
Clapham. A. W., 238 
Clare. S., 157 
Clarke. Lowther, 40, 48, 55 
Clarke. Somers, 225 
Claver, S. Peter, 186 
Cleopatra, 19 
Clerical marriage, 22, 133 
Clermont, 145 
Clonmacnoise, 106-107 
Cluny, Cluniac, 115, Ch. VIII, 

191, 209, 215, 230 
Colchester, 234 
Coldingham, 111 
Colgan, 109 
Colman, 110 
Columba. S., 104, 110-111, 178 
Columbanus. S., 83, 179 
Columbus, 75, 201, 254 


-Commendatory abbots, 81, 93, 137, 


152, 197, 245 
Commonitorium of S. Vincent, 70 
Condate, 60 
Conrad THI, 145-146 
Constantinople, 51-54, 89, 208. 
Constantius, biographer. 
Germanus, 70 
Conversi, 151, 161 
Copt, 21 
Corbey, 93 


Coulton, 31, 85, 98, 115, 127, 137, 


150, 161, 232, 243 
Cranage, 238 
Cronenberg. Walter of, 206 
Cross. S., 294 
Croyland, 228-229 
Cunningham, 72 
Curzon, 55 
Cuthbert, Fr., 154, 169 
Cuthbert. S., 178 
Cyprus, 202 
Cyril of Alexandria, 37, 70 


Dalgairns, J. B., 153 
Dalriada, 104 


of S. 


263 


Dalyngruge, 242 

Damiano. San, 157 

Dante, 99, 211 

Daphne, 229 

David. Cathedral of S., 120, 234 

David. King, 93 

Deans, 79 

Delatte. Abbot, 84, 85, 209, 222 

Demetrias, 64-65 

Denis. S., 250 

Descartes, 357 

Deventer, 213 

Devil offered salvation, 58 

Devils identified with pagan gods, 
34-35 

Dicuil, 103 

Dijon, 129, 138 

Doara, 46 

Domesday Book, 84 

Dominic. §., 138, 161, 165, 170, 
194-196, 218, 220 

Dorotheus, 29 

Dublin, 105, 197, 169 

Dugdale, 112, 122, 169 

Dunfermline, 135, 197 

Duns Scotus, 218, 219 

Durham, 98, 119, 138, 246 


Easter, 110-111 

Ebba. S., 111 

Eccleston, 164, 233, 236 

Eckenstein, 122 

Edinburgh, 168 

Edmund. Abbey of &., 
193, 230, 240 

Edmund Rich. 8., 120 

Egmont, 245 

Egypt, 12, 14, 19-38, 99, 117, 142, 
153, 161, 215, 230, 253 

Einhard, 93, 210, 225 

Elias. Brother, 168 

Elijah, S., 162 

Elizabeth of Hungary, 204 

Elizabeth of Schénau, 113 

Ely, 88, ee 230, 233, 243 

Engaddi, 

English Ba cathedrals, 97 

Enlart, 231 

Ephesus, Council of, 70, 173 

Erasmus, 219, 243 

Erfurt, 50 

Erigena, 103 


119, 125, 


264 


Ktampes, 144 
Etheldreda. S., 111 
Eudists, 97 

Eugenius III, 112 
Eustathius of Sebaste, 28 
Eustochium, 87 
Eutyches, 51 

“Evesham,” 114 
Evagrius, 49, 210 
Exeter, 191, 230 


Faber, 250 

Falkirk, 200 

Far East, 12 (see also China and 
Japan) 

Farrar. Dean, 72 

Figgis. Fr., 259 

Finnian, 104 

Flambard, 98 

Fleming. Sir Christopher, 164 

Fleury, 127 

Florence, 99, 168, 235 

Fontovraud, 115 

Fountains, 146, 152-153, 232, 242, 
244 

Four Masters, 107 

Four orders (of friars), 156 

Fowler, J. T., 153 

France. Anatole, 38 

Francis of Assisi, Franciscans, 31, 
99, 108, 138, 155-161, 166-168, 
170, 174, 181, 194, 217-219 

Frederick II, 141, 204, 211, 212 

Froissart, 211, 215 

Fulda, 93 

Fulk de Neuilly, 149 

Fuller (Worthies of England) , 244 

Furness Abbey, 217 


Gairdner, 246 

Gall. S., 178. Abbey of, 225-227 
Gallicanism, 132 
Gandersheim, 112 
Gangra. Synod of, 28 
Gardner. A, 55 
Gasquet, Cardinal, 246 
Gauls, 65 

Gauzlin. Bp., 131 
Geneva, 97 

Gennadius, 32 

Genoa, 144 

Gerald, 201 


INDEX 


Germans, 204-206 

Germanus, friend of Cassian, 32 

Germanus, who came to the help 
of Britain after the legions had 
left, 70 

Gertrude, 113 

Gervase, 232 

Gibbon. Edward, 73 

Gilbert. S., 115 

Gildas, 212 

Glastonbury, 112, 244 

Gloucester, 73, 119, 121, 233, 235, 
236, 244 

Gloucester Hall, Oxford, 219 

Gnosticism, 13-14, 57 

Godfrey. W. H., 238 

Gothic architecture, 178 

Goths in Italy, 76 

Goulburn. Dean, 209 

Grandmont, 117 

Gratian, 216 

Greek culture, 24, 189 

Gregory the Great, 72, 85, 86-92, 
95, 179, 208 

Gregory the Illuminator, patron 
saint of Armenia, 51 

Gregory Nazianzen, 39 

Gregory of Tours, 177, 180, 211 

Greyfriars Chronicle, 211 

Griesinger. T., 248, 260 

Grosseteste. Bp., 217 

Gualbert, 117 

Guests, 81 

Guibert. Abbot, 118 

Guidiccioni. Cardinal, 252 

Guise, 137 

Gundrada, 133 

Gwatkin. Professor, 22 

Gyratory monks, 78 


Habit. Great and Little, 53 
Hales. Alexander, 218 

Hali Meidenhad, 88 

Hall. F. W., 222 

Hannay. Canon, 55, 77, 85 
Harding. Stephen, 139 
Hardman, 16 

Harnack. Professor, 55 
Hatch. Dr., 14 

Hawes. S., 243 

Hefele, 22, 28, 51, 57, 133 
Helena. S., 226 


INDEX 


Helfta, 113 

Héloise, 147-148 

Helyot, 115 

Henry II (England), 144 

Henry VI, 168, 216 

Henry VIII, 244 

Henry the Navigator, 200 

Herluin, 233 f 

Hermas, 14 

Hermits, Ch. I, 42, 48, 54, 116- 
119 

Hilarius, 58 

Hilda. 8., 110 

Hildebrand (Gregory VII), 132- 
133, 141 

Hildegard, 112 

Hippo, 133 

Hodgkin. Thomas, 85, 199, 210 

Hodson, 97 

Hohenzollern, 206 

Holm. 8. Benet, 91 

Holyrood, 191 

Holy Roman Empire, 93, 99 

Honoratus. S., 69 

Honorius. Emperor, 69 

Honorius II, 144 

- Hope, St. John 
238 

Hrotsvith, 112 

Hugh. Abbot, 115 

Hughes. T., 260 

Hugo. Duke, 140 

Huntingdon, Henry of, 211 

Hyde. Douglas, 106 


(Sir William), 


Iceland, Icelandic, 103, 104, 179, 
910,° 211, 212 

Idiorrhythmic, 54 

India, 12, 30, 66, 174 

Innocent II, 144 

Innocent III, 141 

Inquisition, 250 

Iona, 57, 104, 111, 119, 178 

Ipswich, 245 

Treland, 56, 96, 99, Ch. VI, 230 

Tris. River, 40 

Irving. Washington, 211 

Ivo of Chartres, 97 


Jackson. Prof. Foakes, 87 
Jansen. Bp., 220 


265 

Japan, 12, 181-183, 211, 
220 

Jerome. 8S., 19-21, 30, 32, 61, 63- 
69, 87, 211 

Jerpoint Abbey. 150 

Jerusalem, 27, 116, 145, 199 sezq., 
201, 249 

Jessopp. Dr., 171, 246 

Jesuits, 31, 155, 174, 182-187, 220, 
237, Ch. XVII 

Jews, 165 

Jocelin de Brakelond, 192-193 

John. Abbot, 33 

John XXII, 169 

John. King, 98 

John of the Cross, 153 

John the Faster, 89 

Johnson. Dr., 222 

Joliet, 185 

Judaism, 12 

Julian (Apostate), 46, 58 

Julian of Norwich, 113 

Julius Cesar, 74 

Jusserand, 122 

Justinian, 51 


119, 


Kanghi, 184 

Keating, 109 

Kells. Book of, 102, 107 

Kelso, 230 

Kempis, Thomas a, 213 

Ken. Bp., 259 

Kiev, 53 

Kildare, 101, 107-108 

Kilkenny, 99, 169 

King’s College Chapel, 216 

Kingsley, 38, 100 

Knights Hospitalers, 
204 

Kobo Daishi, 155 

Koln (Cologne), 98, 117, 120 

Konigsberg, 206 

Koran, 52 

Késhlin, 163 

Kuno, 185 


195, 200- 


Lacedemonia, 120 

Lady Poverty, 154, 157, 160-161 
Lanfranc, 233 

Langland, 168, 170, 241 
Laon, 97, 130 


266 


Lapps, 180 

La Salle, 195 

Laud. Archbishop, 258 

Layard, 174 

Leach. A. F., 222 

Leighlin, 169, 235 

Leland, 240 

Lenoir, 45, 225, 237 

Lepanto, 203 

Lerins, 69-71 

Lewes, 133, 197 

Leyden, 245 

Limisso, 202 

Lincoln, 165, 217, 228 

Lippi. Fra Filippo, 235 

Lithuanians, 205 

Tittle Flowers, 155 

Little. A. G., 171 

Loire, 39 

Lombards, 90, 92, 198 

London, 168, 234 

_ Losinga, Herbert de, 208 
Lothaire, 144 

Louis the Pious, 93 

Louis VI, 144 

Louis XIV, 231 

Loyola. Ignatius, 33, 119, 248 seq. 

Lucinius, 66 

Lucius of Antioch, Alexandria, 
28 

Ludlow, 167 

Ludolf, 249 

Lupus of Troyes, 70 

Lurgashall, 170 

Luther. Martin, 50, 99, 156, 163, 
179, 219 


Mabillon, 72, 221, 225 

Macarius. Abbot, 34 

Macarius of Alexandria, 29, 30 

Macarius the Egyptian, 36 

Machiavelli, 247 

McCabe, 260 

Macon, 131-132, 143 

Macrina, 41 

Magna Carta, 194 

Mahomet II, 203-204 

Maintz (Mayence), 179 

Maiolus, 129 

Maitland. F. W., 84 

Laporte S. R., 137, 143,,.179, 
22 


INDEX 


Malchus, 30 

Malmesbury. William of, 153, 210, 
215 

Malta, 203 

Manchus, 184 

Manicheans, 57, 62 

Mann. H. K., 100 

Map. Walter, 211 

Marburg, 204 

Marcellus, 64 

Marco Polo, 182 

Margaret of Scotland. S., 97 

Marianhill, 152 

Marienburg, 205 

Marquette, 185 

Marsden. Cooper, 72 

Martin. S., 57-61, 126 

Mary. S., 36, 65, 113, 139, 143 

Maur. S., 77 

Maurist, 209, 221 

Maximus. 59 

Melgueil. Pontius de, 134 

Melrose, 178, 235 

Mendel, 97 

Merv, 176 

Mesopotamia, 12 

Meteora, 53 

Metz, 96 

Milan, 59, 145 

Milman. Dean, 28, 72, 154, 198 

Milton, 122 

Milwaukee, 237 

Molesme, 139 

Molina, 220 

Mongols, 54, 176, 182 

Monreale, 96 

Montalembert, 72, 105, 109, 111, 
232 

Monte Cassino, 57, 77, 92, 96, 127, 
134, 138 

Montecorvino. John of, 182 

Montfort. Simon de, (Elder), 162, 
196 

Montfort. Simon de, (Younger: 
Earl of Leicester), 169, 196 

Montmartre, 250 

Montserrat, 249 

More. Thomas, 243, 247 

Morison. E. F., 55 

Moslems, 54, 129, 147, 181, 200, 
203 

Mount Grace, 118, 235 


INDEX 


Murdach, 146 
Mustapha, 203 


Naples, 95 

Napoleon, 93, 129, 141, 203-204 

Narses, 89 

Natal, 152 

Nathaniel, 26 

Nennius, 212 

“Nestor,” 211 

Nestorius, Nestorians, 49, 173 

New England, 97 

Newman, Cardinal, 
258 

Nicza. Council of, 22 

Nietzsche, 141 

Nikolai (Japan), 55 

Nikolai (Ochrida), 55 

Ninian. §8., 57 

Norbert. 8., 97 

Norwich, 114, 151, 167, 208, 235, 
240 

Nuns, 110-117 

Nursia, 76 


91-92, 153, 


Observants and \Non-observants, 
166 

Ockham, 218, 219 

Odilo, 129 

Odo. Abbot, 126-128 

Odo. Duke, 139 

O’Donnell. Clan, 105 

Odoric. Friar, 182 

Okuma, 183 

Oliphant. Mrs. 171 

Orange, 133 

Oratorians, 258 

Origen, 14, 70 

Oswy. King, 111 

Otto the Great, 129 

itor LE. U7 

Oxford, 194, 196, 217, 230, 241, 
245 ; 


Pachomius, 24-26, 29, 46, 223 
Paisley, 134 

Paleologi, 203 

Palestine, 48, 123, 134, 163 
Palladius, 25 seq., 38, 210 
Pamiers, 196 
Pammachius, 67 

Pamplona, 249 


267 


Panephysis, 28 

Pannonia, 60 

Paphnutius (Bishop at Nice#a), 
27 

Paphnutius (Buffalo), 27 

Paraclete, 147 

Paraguay, 185-186 

Paris, 120, 147, 218, 250 

Paris. Matthew, 153, 165, 168, 210, 
215 

Parker. Archbishop, 248 

Parkman, 187 

Parliament, 134, 
194, 196 

Pascal, 221, 257 

Patermucius. Abbot, 33 

Paul. S., 14, 30 

Paul the Hermit. S., 14, 19-21 

Paul ITI, 252 

Paul IV (Caraffa), 258 

Paulus Diaconus, 100 

Pecock, Bp., 119 

Peking, 174 

Pelagians, 70-71, 103 

Pelliot. Prof., 177 

Pepin, 96 

Perestrello, 201 

Periods of monastic history, 15- 
16 

Perry. Com., 183 

Peter the Venerable, 118, 134, 143, 
209 

Peterborough, 244 

Petrie. Flinders, 12 

Philip the Fair, 200 

Philo, 15 

Piamun. Abbot, 22 

Piers Plowman, 168 

Pilgrims, 119-122 

Pisa, 144 

Piterius, 26 

Pittances, 151 

Polanco, 254 

Poland, 204-206 

Pompeii, 227 

Pontigny, 120, 147 

Pontitianus, 62 

Portiuncula, 157, 161 

Port Royal, 221 

Portugal, 186, 200, 257 

Possidius, 72 

Power. Eileen, 122 


169, 190, 192, 


268 INDEX 


Prague, 174 

Praty, 242 
Premonstratensian, 97, 115, 
Prior. Prof., 125 

Priscillian, 57, 59 

Procopius, 189 

Provence, 32 

Prussia, 99, 204-206, 257 


Quixote. Don, 249 


Rabelais, 247 

Radegund. 8., 180 

Rait. R. 8., 197 

Ramsey, 232 

Ranecé, 152 

Rashdall. Dean, 216, 219, 222 
Ravenna, 69, 90, 117 
Raymond of Provence, 201 
Récollets, 166 

Reading, 215 

Renaissance, 93, 98 

Renham. Nicholas de, 236 
Reykjavik, 210 

Ricci, 184 

Richard I (Ceur de Lion) 149 
Richard II, 169 

Richard. S., 120 

Richard, Earl of Cornwall, 163 
Rievaulx Abbey, 139 

Riley. Athelstan, 54 

Robert of Arbrissel, 115 
Robert of Molesme, 139 
Robinson. Fr., 157 


Rules (Continued) 
S. Gilbert, 115 
Grandmontian, 117 
Camaldulensian, 117 
S. Francis, 158-159 
Carmelite, 163 
Jesuit, 252 

Ruskin, 83 

Russia, 54, 99, 181, 257 

Rusticus, 63 


Sabatier, 164, 167, 171 
Sabbas. Mar, 48 
Sackites, 163 
Saeki. Prof., 187 
Sagres, 200 
Saladin, 201 
Salamanca, 250 
Salisbury, 228, 241 
Salzman. L. F., 242 
Samson. Abbot, 192 
San Francisco, 182 
Sarabites, 78 


Saracens, 23, 129, 159, 205 


Saragossa, 57 
Savonarola, 236 
Saxon Chronicle, 211 
Scete, 27, 32 
Scholastica, 127 


Scotland, 96, 97, 114, 123, 168, 


197, 230 
Sele Priory, 242 
Seleucia-Ctesiphon, 174 
Sens, 120, 146-147, 232 


Roger of Sicily, 144 Sepulchre, Holy, 178, 201, 229, 
Roman roads, 94 234 
Rome, 27, 64, 76, 92, 94, 116, 128, | Serenus. Abbot, 35 

133, 144, 177, 179, 198, 211, 224, | Serra, Junipero, 181 

226, 252-253 Shaftesbury, 112 


Romsey, 112 Shakespeare, 170, 221, 247 
Romuald, 117 Shenoute. Abbot, 37 
Rouen, 228 Sherborne, 139, 221, 247 


Rubens, 237 Shrines, 119 
Rudolf of Burgundy, 127 Simeon Stylites. S., 48 
Rules: Sinai, 24 

S. Antony, 24 Si-ngan-fu, 174 

S. Pachomius, 24-25 Skelton, 114 

S. Basil, 42-45 Skipton. H. P. K., 260 


S. Augustine, 62-63 Slane, 164 
S. Benedict, 77-83, 124, 190 Smith. Adam, 188 
S. Columbanus, 83-84 Smith. G., 85 


Anoren riwle, 114 Smith. L. M., 131, 137 


Socrates, Church historian, 22, 28, 


47, 226 
Sompting, 234 
Sora, 120 


Sozomen, 24, 25, 28, 29, 50, 57 
Spain, 181, 186, 191, 200, 203, 


249 seq. 
Spence. Dean, 85 
Spires, 145 
Staupitz, 163 
Stephen (Auvergne), 117 
Stephen. King, 146 
Stewarts, 134 
Stokes. Prof., 109 
Storrs. R. 8., 148, 153, 209 
Streanshalch, 110 
Stridon, 63 
Studion, 52-53 
Subiaco, 76 
Suleiman II, 203 
Sulpicians, 185 
Sulpicius Severus, 30, 57-59 
Sweden, 116 
Sword. Brethren of the, 205 
Syrian monks, 173-177 


-Tabenna, 25, 26, 43 

T’ang Dynasty, 175 
Tamassia. N., 155, 171 
Tannenberg, 206 
Taunton, E. C., 85 

Taylor. H. O., 180 
Templars, 199-200, 234 
Tertiaries, 163-164 
Tertullian, 14, 70 

Teutonic Order, 204-206 
Thais, 36 

Theatrines, 258 

Thebes, 29 

Theodore of Studion, 52-53 
Theodoret, 49 

Theodoric, 210 

Theodosius (Younger), 47 


Theodosius, monastic  superin- 


tendant, 48 
Theonas. Abbot, 34 
Theophilus, 26 
Therapeute, 15 
Thierry. William of 8., 142 
Thingore, 211 
Thokey, Abbot, 121 


Thompson. Prof. Hamilton, 238 


INDEX 


Thorn, 206 

Tibet, 13 

Tintern, 139 

Tokio, 55 

Toulouse, 63 

Tours, 57, 59, 93, 126 
Trappist, 152 

Treuga Det, 131 
Trier (Treves), 49, 59 
Trondhjem, 120 
Troyes, 140, 199 


Trullan Council (Second), 51 


Turkestan, 174 
Turks, 203, 251 


Universities, 81, 216 seq. 
Upsala, 115 

Urban II, 139, 145 
Ursula. 8., 113 

Utrecht, 179 


Vacandard, 153 
Valette, 203 
Vallombrosa, 117 
Vasco da Gama, 200 
Venice, 204, 251 
Vicovaro, 76 

Videy, 210 

Vienna, 132 

Villaret, 202 
Villenauxe. Guy de, 120 
Vincent, S., 69-71 
Vitry. Jacques de, 199 
Vivier, 139 

Violet le Duc, 74, 237 
Voltaire, 257 

Vulgate, 68 


Wadstena, 116 
Walcott. Mackenzie, 23 
Walsingham. Alan de, 233 
Warburton. Bp., 73 
Warnerius. Abbot, 198 
Wartburg, 220 

Watton Abbey, 115 
Wavrin, 21] 

Wells, 228 


Westminster, 119, 191, 194, 233, 


244 

Westminster. Matthew of, 
229 

Whitby, 110, 112 


270 


Wilfrid. S., 110 

William the Conqueror, 84, 135 

William de Warenne, 133 

Willibrord. S., 179 

Willis. Prof., 238 

Winchester, 119, 241 

Wishart. Prof., 16 

Wolsey. Cardinal, 217, 245 

Woodhouse. F. C., 207 

Wordsworth. Bp., 116 

Workman. Herbert, 16, 58, 83, 85, 
133, 164 

Wyckliffe, 170, 219, 241 

Wykeham. William of, 241 


INDEX 


Xavier, 182, 251 
Xavier del Bac. San, 185 


York, 146, 153, 230 
Yule. Colonel, 174, 187 
Yuste, 191 


Zachary, 179 
Zimbabwe (Ruins in Rhodesia), 
23 


Zion, 116 
Zodiac, 66 
Zwolle, 214 


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